tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683Thu, 22 Feb 2018 00:44:29 +0000hillary clintonbernie sandersdonald trumptrumpobamaneoliberalismpropagandanew york timesbarack obamaClintonpaul krugmanrussiagatedemocratic partyoligarchydronesclass warcorruptiondemocratsny timesracismwarnew york times commentstppSandersausterityclimate changedeep statemitt romneyplutocracypolitical corruptionwealth inequalityObamacarecapitalismcensorshipfascismhenry girouxmainstream mediarussophobiawikileaksfake newsgreecegun controlhealth carekrugmanmediapaul ryanbill clintoncentrismdavid brooksdemocracydemocratic debatedemocratic national conventionelitismelizabeth warrenfbigreedhypocrisymaureen dowdmoney in politicsphilanthrocapitalismpolitical hypocrisypope francispresidential campaign 2016refugeessingle payer health careterrorism9/11bullshitcharles blowcnncool obamacorporate mediadoctors without bordersdowdimmigrationimperialisminequalityjames comeyjamie dimonjoe bidenkill listleaksmccarthyismmedicare for allmental healthnan socolownevada democratic caucusplutocratspolice brutalitypolitical propagandapovertypresidential politicsracereader commentsromneyross douthatslaverysocial darwinismsocialismsupreme courtwar crimesCBO reportHoward ZinnSimone Weilaffordable care actamerican propagandaamerican violenceanthony weinerblack lives matterbloombergbureau of investigative journalismcampaign 2016capital punishmentcharitychild laborchristmascivil rightsclinton campaigndemocratic establishmentdeportationsdnc conventiondog daysdomestic terrorismdrugseric holderfeminismflintflint water crisisfrackingfrank brunifree tradegay marriagegenocidegeorge w. bushglobalizationgolden globesgoldman sachsgoldwater girlgop debategop tax billgunsharvey weinsteinhiroshimahollywoodhomeland securityhuman rightsislamophobiajared kushnerjeb bushjennifer palmierijill steinkristofkunduzlabor daylgbt rightsmedia biasmedia consolidationmedia propagandamedia spinneoconsnicholas kristofobama legacyoccupy wall streetowspoetrypolice statepolice violencepolitical brandingpolitical dynastiespolitical partiespollspollutionpoor-shamingpopulismprivate insuranceprotestpsychopathypuerto ricopuerto rico debt crisisputinred-baitingrepublican conventionrepublicansrussiasaudi arabiaschool privatizationsenatestate of the unionstuxnetgatesuicidesummer olympicssurveillance stateted cruzterrortorturetriangulationtweetsunipartywar propaganda#MeToo193220162016 campaign2016 election2016 state of the union address201760 minutes exit interviewAmerican declineAmerican historyAmerican hypocrisyAndrew CuomoBig BirdBofACanadaChristopher HitchensCitizens UnitedFlorida nursing home deathsHuman Rights WatchJ.G. 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profiteeringwashington consensuswashington establishmentwashington postwashington press corpswealthwelfare reformwhaleswhat happenedwhat happened bookwhistleblowerswhite house cartoonswhite supremacywilliam lloyd garrisonwilliam shakespearewiredwiretappingwisconsin democratic primarywisconsin recallwolf blitzerwomen in mediawomen of the worldwonks vs. sandernistaswoody guthrieworkplace discriminationyemenzephyr teachoutSardonicky politics, media, culturehttp://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)Blogger1460125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-6231037435281662819Tue, 20 Feb 2018 16:18:00 +00002018-02-21T10:49:36.409-05:00corporate mediadomestic propagandaflorida school shootingrussiagateWhen American Propaganda Attacks<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Donald Trump is getting some well-deserved criticism for trying to co-opt the latest school massacre and make it all about himself. To wit: if the FBI wasn't so busy investigating him and his entire extended crime family, they would have heeded the numerous tips and warnings and stopped Nikolas Cruz in his maniacal tracks before he slaughtered 17 innocent people. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">If only the mainstream media weren't also co-opting the latest school shooting by making it all about the Attack of the Russian Bots co-opting the latest school shooting!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">In its latest front-page scare story designed to manufacture public consent for war on Russia, whose chintzy meddling marketing campaign against our "democracy"&nbsp; has already been hysterically likened to Pearl Harbor and Nine-Eleven by war profiteers both in and out of government, the <i>New York Times </i>warns that the only thing we have to fear other than fear itself (oh, and assault weapons) are the Russian bots taking over Twitter.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The implicit message to all those disaffected young people complaining that nobody is protecting them is that their anger might be getting unduly stoked by Kremlin hashtags. Think twice before thinking for yourself and marching on Washington and other activist things. Be aware that every time you read about a rally or a march on Facebook or Twitter, it might be fake Russian news designed to divide you and sow your discontent to truly dangerous, foreign levels.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">While CNN is moving quickly to co-opt the students of Parkland, Florida by casting the brightest of them in one of their "town hall" spectaculars this week, the <i>Times </i>was shamelessly melding the shooting story with the Russiagate story. Not only are the bloodthirsty, perpetual war-financed cable networks pouncing on the story, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/technology/russian-bots-school-shooting.html?hp&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=a-lede-package-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-newshttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/technology/russian-bots-school-shooting.html?hp&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=a-lede-package-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news">the Russian Bot Army is horning in on it.</a></span> <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="430" data-total-count="635"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.</i></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="272" data-total-count="907"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>“This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.”</i></span></div></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Any news event — no matter how tragic — has become fodder to spread inflammatory messages in what is believed to be a far-reaching Russian disinformation campaign. The disinformation comes in various forms: conspiracy videos on YouTube, fake interest groups on Facebook, and armies of bot accounts that can hijack a topic or discussion on Twitter.</i></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><br /></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>&nbsp;Those automated Twitter accounts have been closely tracked by researchers. Last year, <a href="http://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/">the Alliance for Securing Democracy</a>, in conjunction with the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian influence campaign.</i></span></div></blockquote><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">You can tell this is propaganda because the <i>Times</i> doesn't inform readers about the powerful plutocrats and corporations that run and bankroll these "research groups." The Alliance for Securing Democracy, as myself and a few others (notably <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/07/17/with-new-d-c-policy-group-dems-continue-to-rehabilitate-and-unify-with-bush-era-neocons/">Glenn Greenwald</a>) have written before, is staffed by many of the discredited neoconservatives and liberal interventionists who made the fraudulent case for the US invasion of Iraq. It is funded not only by defense contractors, but likely also by a new State Department initiative called the Center for Global Engagement. Signed into law by President Obama in 2016, the Center is funded by public money and allows for the previously outlawed direct dissemination of propaganda by our own government to us, the citizenry. If the <i>New York Times</i>, whose torrents of Russophobic articles are now so intense that it's impossible to keep up with them all, is not also a beneficiary of this public funding, then they're being cheated out of a multimillion-dollar windfall.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Is it a coincidence that the CEO of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, Laura Rosenberg, arrived at her job direct from Obama's State Department? </span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><br /></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/us-officials-wont-say-if-a-new-anti-russia-propaganda-project-is-targeting-americans/">As <i>The Nation's</i> Adam Johnson reported in 2017,&nbsp;</a></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Originally created in March of last year for anti-ISIL messaging, the Global Engagement Center distributes “counter” propaganda, social-media messaging, and original journalistic content. The revamp would—<a href="http://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2016/12/president-signs-portman-murphy-counter-propaganda-bill-into-law">according</a> to the author of the NDAA language Senator Rob Portman’s office—“increase the authority, resources, and mandate of the Global Engagement Center to include state actors like Russia and China.”</i></span> </div><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>What isn’t clear is if the Global Engagement Center, with all of its new “authority, resources and mandate,” will be used to target American audiences or pay American journalists. In 2013, Congress repealed major sections of the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which had previously instituted a ban on the State Department and related agencies from “propagandizing” directly to Americans. The 2013 changes, which were <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/congressmen-seek-to-lift-propaganda-ban">first reported</a> by the late Michael Hastings in Buzzfeed, led to much confusion at the time as to what the repeal did and didn’t do (some thought it <a href="https://www.juancole.com/2012/05/congress-wants-the-department-of-defense-to-propagandize-americans.html">deeply pernicious</a>, others <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/congress-propaganda">not so much</a>). Subsequent <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/donald-trump-voice-of-america-232442">attempts</a> to clear up the current law on targeting Americans <a href="http://www.publicdiplomacycouncil.org/commentaries/12-17-16/fact-check-bbg-can-now-broadcast-americans">haven’t resulted in</a> a clear consensus, a problem that’s becoming increasingly urgent as the US government doubles its efforts to combat the much-publicized Russian propaganda machine. </i></span></blockquote><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">How doubly ironic, therefore, that President Trump is wondering right out loud why President Obama himself was so sanguine and lackadaisical about this unprecedented Russian attack on our pristine electoral processes. If I had to hazard a guess, it was because the brilliant Obama didn't dream that the protectionist Trump would ever win, and that there would even be a need for an all-out effort to sway American public opinion on Russia as the default enemy du jour. After all, Obama's shtick back then was the "pivot to China" - code for choking off its economic growth via the US oligarchy-serving Trans-Pacific Partnership. Therefore, the US oligarchy has been forced to "pivot" to a new contrived arch-enemy - Russia - to avoid the rise of any more "axes of evil" to threaten the profits and power of the US hegemon. </span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><br /></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">***</span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><br /></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Everything is fair game for domestic attack under the fig leaf of Russian meddling, and that includes the Black Lives Matter movement and other radical, youth-based movements. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller thus dutifully added to his Narrative indictment the juicy bit about Russian trolls orchestrating and advertising rallies by black people against police brutality.</span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><br /></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Times</i> columnist Charles Blow dutifully enhanced this scare-narrative in his Monday <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/opinion/black-vote-russia.html">group-think piece</a>, which included a gratuitous dig at the "lionized social justice hero" Colin Kaepernick - he didn't <i>vote!</i> - as well as implicit criticism of activist-writer Michelle Alexander, whose <i>New Jim Crow</i> Blow huffily described as an "activist bible" for those millions of young black voters who didn't come out in record numbers for either racist presidential candidate and as a result, got us all saddled with the more loathsome and outspoken racist candidate. And Bernie supporter, the rapper Killer Mike? He had the nerve to not support Hillary even after she won the nomination!</span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">It's malcontents and critics like these, Blow not so subtly implies, who created the vacuum necessary for the Russian bots and trolls to swoop in and keep all the black folks home on Election Day.</span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="144" data-total-count="5511"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"There is no way to know how many black people would have settled on the exact same course of action without the interference," Blow concludes. "But what we do now know with absolute certainty is that in making their electoral choices, black folks had unwanted hands on their backs, unethical and illegal ones, nudging them toward an apathy built on anger.What happened in this election wasn’t just a political crime, it was specifically a racialized crime, and the black vote was a central target."</span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="144" data-total-count="5511"><br /></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="144" data-total-count="5511"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Judging from all the laudatory reader comments, Blow struck a real chord among the mostly white readership. Finally, somebody liberal and black was brave enough to let Kaepernick and Killer Mike and all those uppity Black Lives Matter youths have it. It's red-baiting and race-baiting at its finest. It's the new Democratic Party McCarthyism writ large.</span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="144" data-total-count="5511"><br /></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="144" data-total-count="5511"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">My initial&nbsp; comment, which made the above critiques, was axed by the <i>Times</i> censors. I had better luck with my second submission, published the following day:</span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="144" data-total-count="5511"></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="144" data-total-count="5511"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">This column strikes me as a veiled insult to young black voters, whom Blow casts as naive enough to be influenced by some truly cheesy Russian ads disseminated by only 90 underpaid trolls.<br /><br />So easy to scapegoat "Russians" for "amplifying" the domestic discontent here in Exceptional USA. Given that this was the same tactic used by the US political-media complex against protests during the civil rights era and the Vietnam War, I'm kind of surprised it still has such influential staying power - until I remember Joseph Goebbels's maxim for effective propaganda: repeat it over and over and over again, and people will start believing it. The best part of this current Russophobic campaign is that it saves people the trouble of thinking for themselves.<br /><br />Think about it for a minute. Young black people who didn't vote in the last election because they "felt like" it was no use are effectively being guilt-tripped for refusing to participate in a corrupt system in which the ultra-rich decide who can best represent oligarchic interests. Telling people that they were victims of a racialized crime by Russian trolls deflects attention from the real culprits, the oligarchs who run the place, named Koch, Adelson, Sinclair, and plundering corporations like Exxon-Mobil and six too-big-to fail/jail banks which effectively evicted and impoverished millions of black and brown people.<br /><br />So hey, look over there at the evil Facebook ad of cartoon Hillary with devil horns punching out Jesus! </span></div></blockquote><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FMlz_AETwz8/WoxEfUEkMXI/AAAAAAAAGpw/w7LZm6fSHIs-socpjlQpfW6Watt2lEszwCLcBGAs/s1600/hillary%2Bjesus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="224" data-original-width="225" height="398" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FMlz_AETwz8/WoxEfUEkMXI/AAAAAAAAGpw/w7LZm6fSHIs-socpjlQpfW6Watt2lEszwCLcBGAs/s400/hillary%2Bjesus.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><br /><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="144" data-total-count="5511"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">This ad, first released among a trove last November, displays <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-ads-now-publicly-released-show-sophistication-of-influence-campaign/2017/11/01/d26aead2-bf1b-11e7-8444-a0d4f04b89eb_story.html?utm_term=.aa3fb5074bb2">"the sophistication"</a> of the Russian influence campaign, according to the <i>Washington Post.&nbsp;</i></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><br /></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">If this is the mainstream media's idea of sophistication, then we're in far worse trouble than I thought.</span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><br /></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="1528" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Or maybe not: the students currently fighting their own existential battle - their right to not get shot to death - sound a lot more savvy than their doddering elders. Just let Wolf Blitzer and the gang try and tell them it's partly the Russians' fault that one of their classmates snapped, and watch some real sophistication spring into action. I have an optimistic feeling that the students won't be co-opted gently into that premature night of total and permanent darkness and ignorance.</span></div>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/02/when-american-propaganda-attacks.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-29050582049932062Sun, 18 Feb 2018 17:27:00 +00002018-02-19T12:15:09.582-05:00greedmueller indictmentpropagandarussiagatespectacleKeep the Russiagate Revenue Flying: Update <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Part of Donald Trump's timeless, if limited and grotesque, appeal is that he occasionally blunders into the unvarnished truth. So it is with his latest tweeted observation that "they're laughing their asses off in Moscow" over the indictment by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller of three companies including Russian troll farm and thirteen of its grossly underpaid sock puppets. The American powers that be would actually have us believe that <a href="http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/02/mueller-indictement-the-russian-influence-is-a-commercial-marketing-scheme.html">a Russian oligarch</a> who got started in the troll business attacking bad reviews of his rancid hot dogs is waging an all-out attack against our "democracy" by bringing his cheesy marketing campaign to our own precious shores.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The fact that Mueller released his "blockbuster" indictment at the start of a three-day holiday weekend is the first clue that it's mainly a combination of old news and partisan agitprop. Because whenever government officials want unpleasant or misleading news to be as unexamined as possible, they release it in News Dump Prime Time: the start of a long holiday weekend, rather than bright and early on a Monday morning, when bright-eyed reporters and pundits are scrambling for something new to talk about and analyze and disseminate in the greatest numbers.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Even so, when even Russiagate true believers like the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/18/the-russian-journalist-who-helped-uncover-election-meddling-is-confounded-by-the-mueller-indictments/?utm_term=.ccba453ffb51"><i>Washington Post</i></a> are taking notice that Mueller actually cut and pasted a significant portion of the indictment from a <i>Russian</i> magazine piece published last fall by actual <i>Russian</i> journalists, you kind of get the feeling that this indictment is not so much a rancid hot dog as a nothing-burger. It's old news being blown out of all proportion. It's a hunk of gristle thrown out for a ravenous media establishment to chew on in the lack of any new meaty blockbusters about Trump-Russia "collusion."&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;Adam Taylor of the <i>Post</i> writes:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>In&nbsp;a 4,500-word report titled “<a href="https://www.rbc.ru/magazine/2017/11/59e0c17d9a79470e05a9e6c1">How the 'troll factory' worked the U.S. elections,</a>” journalists&nbsp;Polina Rusyaeva and Andrey Zakharov&nbsp;offered the fullest picture yet of how the&nbsp;“American department” of the IRA used Facebook, Twitter and other tactics to inflame tensions ahead of the 2016 vote. The article also looked at the&nbsp;staffing structure of the organization and revealed details about its budget and salaries....</i></span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>&nbsp;Zakharov explained how it was a strange feeling seeing something he had so closely investigated become a major issue in the United States, when it had not been a “bombshell” when he published his report at home.</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Zakharov confirmed to the Post that people, if not "the Kremlin" itself, are indeed laughing their asses off.&nbsp; "A lot of Russian conservatives&nbsp;were proud," he said. "They said: 'Look at what Russians can do! Only 90 people with $2 million made America scared! We are strong!' And for conservative people here, they&nbsp;see that Americans have CNN, Radio Free Europe, etc., that cover Russia. They say, 'Why can’t we establish groups in America and have our own influence?' That's how conservative people think here. They think this was normal."</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The troll farm workers should probably demand a raise from the rancid hot dog oligarch. After all, if the tsar freed the Russian serfs in the 19th century,&nbsp; the ruling oligarchs who have now inherited the earth should free them anew and pay them more than the paltry grand or so a month that they're currently making.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">This is so reminiscent of other sock puppet campaigns, such as the "Correct the Record" troll farm run by Clintonoid flack David Brock. Poorly paid (even unpaid) trolls would flood the Internet comment boards with boilerplate attacks every time some actual person criticized their candidate. I can't tell you how many times these anonymous posters would accuse me, personally, of hurting Hillary's chances - and later actually personally costing her the election all by myself - every time I had something nice to say about Bernie Sanders, or something unflattering to say about Hillary herself on <i>New York Times</i> comment threads.&nbsp; Who knew I had so much power at my typing fingertips? I don't know whether to laugh my ass off or cry in despair whenever one of these rancid sock puppets still digitally gets in my face and accuses me of being a Russian stooge, a closet Republican Trump operative, an anti-feminist, or all three.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">As <a href="http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-clinton-digital-trolling-20160506-snap-htmlstory.html">the<i> Los Angeles Times</i> reported</a> about Brock's troll farm in May 2016, toward the end of primary season, </span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>“It is meant to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical,” said Brian Donahue, chief executive&nbsp;of the consulting firm Craft Media/Digital.</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>“That is what the Clinton campaign has always been about," he said. "It runs the risk of being exactly what their opponents accuse them of being: a campaign that appears to be populist but is a smokescreen that is paid and brought to you by lifetime political operatives and high-level consultants.”</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>The task force designed to stop the spread of online misinformation and misogyny is the brainchild of David Brock, a Clinton confidant who once made a career of spreading such misinformation and misogynistic attacks against her and Bill Clinton. His critics say he&nbsp;kept his taste for dirty tricks when he switched sides to become one of the Clintons’ most valued operatives.</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Although the "operatives" employed by Correct the Record were actually caught posting pornographic content on Bernie Sanders social media pages, no investigations or indictments of Brock's troll farm were ever forthcoming from the FBI and the Justice Department. Because only American trolls and corporations and the Kochs and the Adelsons and the Sinclairs are ever allowed to meddle in American elections.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"> </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">In the interests of democracy and fairness and international good will, I think we should stage at least one televised debate between the Russian trolls and the American trolls to determine once and for all who can shout out their boilerplate talking points the loudest. For one thing, they work cheap (if not absolutely free), and would cost the corporate media conglomerates practically nothing. For another thing, they would bring in huge ratings and revenue for the corporate media, which is all that really matters in our politics-as-spectator sport "democracy." Naturally, such a show would have to be staged in a secret offshore location to protect the Russian trolls from actually being arrested as a result of Mueller's indictment. I would suggest a real working farm, with the stage adorned by various high-tech agricultural implements, the better to sow the chaos and the discontent. They'll have a wonderful time threshing it all out and making lots of hay as the oligarchs who own both countries reap all the unjust rewards for themselves.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The specially selected audience could be fitted out with truth-o-meters in order to measure their emotional responses to each troll. The grand prize for most effective trollery and flame-throwing might even be a contract for a paid gig on CNN or MSNBC or Fox as a part-time contributor. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Russiagate would be such a fun, farcical spectacle were it not for the fact that both the countries involved hoard vast quantities of nuclear weapons. Their greed instinct is threatening to overtake their survival instinct, to the detriment of every living thing on this planet.</span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/02/keep-russigate-revenue-flying-update.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-4054898241262084252Wed, 14 Feb 2018 14:16:00 +00002018-02-18T12:28:53.369-05:00american propagandarussiagateKeep the Russiagate Revenue Flying<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Talk about amplifying a bellicose propaganda campaign. Right in the middle of the <i>New York Times's </i>latest "The<i> </i>Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!" <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/us/politics/russia-sees-midterm-elections-as-chance-to-sow-fresh-discord-intelligence-chiefs-warn.html">front page scare-story</a> is a hyperlink to "narrative architect" Molly McKew's piece in <i>Politico</i>. That piece, which I wrote about <a href="https://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/02/disinformation-neocon-style.html">here</a>, itself had amplified and hyperlinked to numerous other fear-mongering articles written by the gigantic pulsating hive mind of the corporate media.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">However, since the <i>Times</i> piece was ostensibly about the leaders of the Intelligence Hive Mind amplifying the fear in sworn testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, the sneaky hyperlink insertion was necessarily discreet: </span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;</span>Russia appears eager to spread information — real and fake — that deepens political divisions. Bot armies <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/04/trump-twitter-russians-release-the-memo-216935">promoted partisan causes</a> on social media, including the recent push to release a Republican congressional memo critical of law enforcement officials.</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp; The <i>Times</i> felt no obligation inform its readers that its linked source, Molly McKew, is a Washington lobbyist posing as a pundit who gets paid big bucks by a couple of Eastern European oligarchs who'd simply love to get rid of Vladimir Putin, who got an outsize share of the loot when the Soviet Union collapsed.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The public instead must be informed that "Russia" is out to destroy American democracy by its constant meddling, and that Donald Trump, by dint of his own failure to condemn Russia all day and every day, is thereby a traitor to his country as well as a likely money-launderer and grifter. What better way to start a war and scapegoat a president, even as they merrily give this same traitorous president billions more dollars than he asked for to continue waging undeclared wars in the Middle East, Africa, and beyond?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">If the Media-Political Complex can keep our eyes exclusively glued on Trump and his tabloid bromance with Putin, they won't even need to write a scary front-page story about his American drones <a href="https://www.vox.com/world/2018/2/13/17008446/us-troops-syria-russia-mercenaries-killed">just having killed</a> hundreds of people in Syria! When they do report this horror, the targets were only "mercenaries," or "Russians," if not reduced to a solid baker's dozen. In some accounts, since their very nationalities are in doubt, their very humanity is in doubt. They are, in the long run, probably nobody at all. No big deal. Trump's sin is not that he murders and maims people, but that he occasionally has had nice things to say about his frenemy. He is a very convenient smokescreen indeed. When propaganda high beams are leveled at a fog, the cloud only becomes more opaque. And isn't that the whole point?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Meanwhile, as the <i>Times</i> breathlessly informs us:&nbsp; </span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Russia is already meddling in the midterm elections this year, the top American intelligence officials said on Tuesday, warning that Moscow is using a digital strategy to worsen the country’s political and social divisions.</i></span><br /><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="224" data-total-count="464"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Russia is using fake accounts on social media — many of them bots — to spread disinformation, the officials said. European elections are being targeted, too, and the attacks were not likely to end this year, they warned.</i></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="347" data-total-count="811"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>“We expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false-flag personas, sympathetic spokespeople and other means of influence to try to exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States,” Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee at its annual hearing on worldwide threats.</i></span></div></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Dan Coats is repeating Molly McKew's talking points right down to the letter. The agenda, obviously, is to cast all domestic dissent as Russian propaganda. American citizens, the majority of whom don't even have a few hundred bucks stashed away to pay for an emergency car repair, would be so satisfied with their lives if it weren't for those Russian bots and trolls amplifying stuff on social media. And if you do dare complain, and if you do express healthy skepticism about the source of your pain and suffering, the implication is that you're really no better than Trump: </span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>The warnings were striking in their contrast to President Trump’s public comments. He has mocked the very notion of Russian meddling in the last election and lashed out at those who suggested otherwise.</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, Mark Warner, re-amplified the pivot point "tell" of McKew's flimsy Narrative Architecture, which maintains that even though the dissent might initially be all-American, the fact that "Russian bots" are co-opting it renders it dangerous and meaningless and downright unpatriotic - especially when citizens start accusing the FBI, the NSA and the CIA of political motivations:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="268" data-total-count="2850"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;<i>“Other threats to our institutions come from right here at home,” he said. “There have been some, aided and abetted by Russian internet bots and trolls, who have attacked the basic integrity of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. This is a dangerous trend.”</i></span></div></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Translation: Shut up, get off the streets, return to your homes, lock your doors, draw the curtains and love Big Brother as he spies upon you for your own good. Your thinking has been corrupted, but we're here to help you and purify you and keep you safe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;The only dangerous trend I could see in that paragraph was Mark Warner himself. If anything, he is even scarier than Donald Trump, because he cloaks himself with such a patina of phony virtue.</span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/02/keep-russiagate-revenue-flying.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-4015191994795892746Sat, 10 Feb 2018 18:52:00 +00002018-02-14T10:23:04.154-05:00booksny timesrecord revenuesextrumpSexing Up The New York Times<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/new-york-times-company-earnings.html">The <i>New York Times</i> announced this week</a> that its paid subscription revenue had passed the record $1 billion mark, thanks in large part to its reinventing itself as the go-to source for #Resistance fighters of the liberal class, hungry to share their hatred of everything the Trump regime stands for.</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="237" data-total-count="1216" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>During an earnings call on Thursday, Mark Thompson, the chief executive of The Times, said the company was pleased with the “continued strong retention” among the users who subscribed to The Times amid the 2016 presidential election.</i></span></div><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i></i></span> <br /><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="122" data-total-count="1338" id="story-continues-3"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>“We’ve continued to make encouraging progress and are seeing far lower monthly churn than a few years ago,” he said.</i></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="249" data-total-count="1587"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Digital advertising revenue increased 14 percent last year, to $238 million. In the last three months of the year, digital advertising revenue rose 9 percent, to $84 million; it now represents 46 percent of the company’s total advertising revenue.</i></span></div></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">And to complement the never-ending appetite for Donald Trump, the newspaper has honed its own edginess to razor-sharp intensity by dishing ever more salacious dirt on the lives of Trump, his detestable inner circle of unworthies, and all manner of Trump-like predators and schmucks. Unfiltered quotes from the potty mouth of the Mooch, details of the crimes of Harvey Weinstein so graphic that it would have been unthinkable for the <i>Times</i> to print them even a year ago, lurid gossip from previously discredited opposition research dossiers - it's all fit to print now.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">And given its own long history of prudish standards and practices, the <i>Times</i> certainly has a lot of catching up to do. Just witness how many times its staid op-ed writers have been inserting "shithole" into as many columns as they can, just because they suddenly can. Trump, who rose to power in New York City through regular sleazy publicity in the tabloids, has succeeded in turning the Paper of Record into a tabloid practically all by himself.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Still, when the <i>Times</i> decided to publish its <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/section/books/review?action=click&amp;contentCollection=books&amp;region=navbar&amp;module=collectionsnav&amp;pagetype=sectionfront&amp;pgtype=sectionfront">latest weekend book review section</a> as a click-worthy treatise on sex lit, both ancient and modern, it just can't help displaying its historical squeamishness. Even when unabashedly selling sex, the editors find it necessary to paint their project with the gloss of virtue and clinical intellectualism.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">It fell to a 20-something book review staffer named Lauren Christensen to write the <i>Times Insider </i><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/insider/book-review-sex-issue.html?src=twr">"explainer" piece</a> about the project, because "everybody knows" that 20-somethings are shallow creatures who are mainly interested in reading about Kim Kardashian, cute pets, "The Bachelor," teen pregnancies, and sex.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br />&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">In the interests of her target audience, Christensen had already recently reviewed a book about the history of sex toys. Then she claims to have been surprised when a male colleague dropped by her desk to recommend other books in the genre, such as "Buzz" and "Vibrator Nation."</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Since these books were written from a feminist point of view, the referrals were construed by Christensen to be a matter of professional collegiality and not an instance of sexual harassment in the workplace. Thus, like any minion at the bottom of the heap, she "dutifully" posted some blurbs to Instagram, to many ensuing clicks and eyeballs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"Thus the seeds of what has now resulted in the Sex Issue — brilliantly christened 'Pleasure Reading' by our editor, Pamela Paul — were sown," enthuses Christensen, in a cute and suck-uppy attempt at double entendre humor.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">And now we get the birth product resulting from the great unsheathing.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-amK_xkCfXqw/Wn8-LJlR_ZI/AAAAAAAAGo4/UmcSQp1HFTwPaPQZxxswXx9AIc5HHtbHQCLcBGAs/s1600/book%2Breview%2Bsex.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="558" data-original-width="768" height="290" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-amK_xkCfXqw/Wn8-LJlR_ZI/AAAAAAAAGo4/UmcSQp1HFTwPaPQZxxswXx9AIc5HHtbHQCLcBGAs/s400/book%2Breview%2Bsex.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">First the disclaimer: For all her heavy reading, Christensen for some reason finds it necessary to defend her own virtue, skating right on the regressive edge of learned female helplessless. She can't seem to stop insisting in her "explainer" piece how truly <i>naive</i> she is at heart, and how embarrassed she initially felt about doing the project. I guess she hasn't been reading her own newspaper's articles on Trump and Weinstein and their ilk. And she really should start, because whenever women feel forced into doing uncomfortable things at work, the psychological damage can last a lifetime. Then again, maybe she's just acting the part of the arch <i>Times</i> critic:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i><b>Inevitably, oversight of the issue fell by consensus to me, the lone 20-something.</b> I have ever since been trying to pretend that, when it comes to sex, I have the slightest clue what I’m talking about. I started by pooling my resources, aggregating 50 covers of the most erotic books throughout literary history for the week’s visual back page, “Under the Covers.” (Please appreciate the word “seminal” on that page; it is one of my proudest career achievements to date.) The day that email went out revealed my impossibly erudite colleagues in a new light, instantly transformed as they were into giddy schoolchildren trading naughty jokes behind the teacher’s back. One by one the previewers revealed the steamy, guilty pleasures of their literary pasts. We’ve collectively done some pretty dirty reading.</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">As edgy as it pretends to be, the <i>Times </i>still very much dwells in the Victorian Age, when people also merely pretended to be squeamish about sex as they lustfully went about reading about it, writing about it, and doing it.&nbsp; How does one even censor a Sex Issue, anyway? Christensen daintily explains: </span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>The real fun began once these pieces started rolling in — turns out it’s not so easy to compile a Sex Issue while maintaining The Times’s elevated house style. Some edits were obvious: As much as I admired Ms. Marnell’s rough-around-the-edges, colloquial and honest writing style, I simply couldn’t run either of the two “b” verbs she used as synonyms for intercourse. Less obvious was that I’d need to remove a detailed, explicit quote from the memoir she reviewed, “Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction.” I had to paraphrase it at the expense, I felt, of the full force of both the book’s and Ms. Marnell’s prose. Mercifully, Philip B. Corbett, the paper’s standards and ethics arbiter, did allow me to keep the quote, “I came so hard I thought my heart would explode.”</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The <i>Times</i> recently got rid of its copy-editing desk, but thankfully, Corbett's job is still apparently safe.&nbsp; He's the guy who pretends to carefully weigh what is and what is not acceptable to print, so as to give the repressed writers the pleasure of exploding with joy whenever they're allowed to keep in the naughty bits, like "seminal." After all, seduction wouldn't be sexy if it didn't maintain the aphrodisiac of coquettish modesty.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">But back to how good Trump has been for the<i> Times Narrative</i> brand. The president being a self-described non-reader, I wonder if the "Sex Issue" might even inspire him to add some of<i> </i>its<i> </i>titillating recommendations to his lonely bedside table copy of <i>Mein Kampf</i>. The volumes would certainly enhance the pleasure of eating cheeseburgers in bed, and might even inspire him to turn off Fox News for a few minutes every day as he laboriously mouths all the words between bites. Perhaps he can start with the YA (youthful audience) section before finally working himself up to Ovid (for poetry in Tweets) and Joyce (for improving his stream-of-consciousness skills.)</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">I think I'm being arch.</span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/02/sexing-up-new-york-times.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-5609588781792292278Thu, 08 Feb 2018 19:55:00 +00002018-02-08T14:55:05.413-05:00eric holderpresidential runtoo big to jailWall Street Might Run For President Directly<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who made the term <a href="http://As a Justice Department functionary in 1999, Holder wrote the infamous “collateral consequences” memo, advising prosecutors to take into account economic damage that might result from criminally convicting a major corporation. In 2013, he unwittingly earned his place in history for telling the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I am concerned that the size of some of these [financial] institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them,” which became known as the “Too Big to Jail” theory.">"too big to jail"</a> infamous, says he is <a href="https://www.blogger.com/We%E2%80%99ll%20see,%E2%80%9D%20he%20said%20during%20a%20breakfast%20sponsored%20by%20the%20Christian%20Science%20Monitor%20in%20Washington,%20DC.%20see%20also%20Holder:%20Obama%20preparing%20to%20get%20back%20into%20political%20spotlight%20Holder:%20Obama%20preparing%20to%20get%20back%20into%20political%20spotlight%20%20He%20was%20asked%20if%20he%E2%80%99s%20mulling%20a%20run%20for%20the%20White%20House%20because%20he%E2%80%99s%20learning%20how%20to%20raise%20funds%20and%20giving%20political%20speeches.%20%20%E2%80%9CI%20think%20I%E2%80%99ll%20make%20a%20decision%20by%20the%20end%20of%20the%20year%20about%20whether%20or%20not%20there%20is%20another%20chapter%20in%20my%20government%20service,%E2%80%9D%20he%20replied.">pondering</a> another revolving-door spin from his gig defending white collar criminals - this time all the way to the Oval Office.&nbsp; </span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>We’ll see,” he said during a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington, DC.</i></span><br /><div class="inline-related alignright"><div class="module--see-also box module inline related desktop" id="more-on"><div class="module-wrapper "> <article class="story-photo-box oversize-headline"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><a class="story-thumbnail-wrapper" href="https://nypost.com/2017/03/02/holder-obama-preparing-to-get-back-into-political-spotlight/"> <source data-srcset="https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/170302-obama-return-politics-feature.jpg?quality=90&amp;strip=all&amp;w=231&amp;h=154&amp;crop=1 1x" media="(min-width: 640px)"></source> <source data-srcset="https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/170302-obama-return-politics-feature.jpg?quality=90&amp;strip=all&amp;w=94&amp;h=62&amp;crop=1 1x" media="(max-width: 639px)"></source>&nbsp;</a></i></span><div class="tracking"> </div></article> </div></div></div><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>He was asked if he’s mulling a run for the White House because he’s learning how to raise funds and giving political speeches.</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>“I think I’ll make a decision by the end of the year about whether or not there is another chapter in my government service,” he replied.</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This is known as the political trial balloon. We'll see whether enough voters swoon when he again explains his deferred prosecution agreements with Wall Street criminal banks and how he agonized over giving presidents, including most recently the demented Donald Trump, the right to drone people to death at will anywhere on the planet.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Admittedly, the bar has been set conveniently low for Democrats, even a heavily damaged Democrat like Holder. In his first "major rare interview," he did after all <a href="https://www.mediaite.com/online/eric-holder-shreds-trump-in-rare-interview-any-one-of-my-kids-would-be-a-better-president/">schmooze to Rachel Maddow</a> that even one of his kids would be a better president than Trump. Unlike the Normless Wonder, Holder would protect and respect the FBI and other members of the Intelligence Community who have all but ignored "the malefactors of great wealth" in order to set up sting operations against Muslim terrorists. Unlike Trump, Holder never called their countries of origin "shitholes" as he respectfully wrote his often-secret legal opinions on how to quietly tail them if not therapeutically drone them to death by means of unnaccountable surgical strikes.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Ditto for immigration. Holder never used racist dog-whistles as he gave the Obama administration legal cover for its record mass deportations, many of whom were unaccompanied minors who were condemned to almost certain deaths from gang and political violence when they were forcibly returned to their Central American home countries. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Somehow, the issue of Trump's horrific pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio never came up during the "rare" sit-down with his good pal Rachel, because that might have led to the awkward question of his own notorious pardon recommendation for Clinton donor and fugitive Wall Street crook Marc Rich, issued on the eve of Holder's first revolving door-spin from ignoring wealthy criminals in public to vigorously defending them, for big bucks, in private.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">His kid-glove treatment of the money-laundering, drug-dealing kingpin HSBC alone should disqualify Holder from a presidential run.But no matter. The luxury corner office of Covington and Burling will always stay open for him, as would another revolving door spin the next time a corporate Democrat wins.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uE-bpXN9awQ/WnyqvcZRNmI/AAAAAAAAGoo/gvn7Ia8WMNAdMyCcZIVIX9rDjS3zBlCuACLcBGAs/s1600/eric%2Bholder.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="256" data-original-width="197" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uE-bpXN9awQ/WnyqvcZRNmI/AAAAAAAAGoo/gvn7Ia8WMNAdMyCcZIVIX9rDjS3zBlCuACLcBGAs/s400/eric%2Bholder.jpg" width="307" /></a></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Gravitas of the Chin-Stroker </span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/02/wall-street-might-run-for-president.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-7808800814837170945Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:29:00 +00002018-02-08T12:02:30.130-05:00russia voter roll hackThe Trouble With the Latest Hacking Story <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">A Homeland Security official has told NBC News that Russian hackers <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/372816-russia-successfully-penetrated-voter-rolls-in-some-states-report">"successfully penetrated"</a> the voter registration rolls of an "exceptionally small" number of states prior to the 2016 elections. There is no evidence that the data were actually tampered with, as in purging the names of registered voters. It simply means that the lists were read, copied and collected.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">What virtually none of the alarmist news coverage bothers to explain is that US voter registration rolls are already legally accessible public records. If Russia wanted to access voter data in Washington, D.C., for example, all its spies had to do was click on the District's Board of Elections official website. Every registered voter's information was already there for the taking: name, home address, party affiliation, precinct ward and whether or not they voted in each election since 2012.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Elsewhere in the United States, it's often harder. Those wishing to penetrate the voter registration rolls might have to submit a formal request, either in person or by mail.&nbsp; This is exactly how you end up on the junk mail lists of every politician running for office. It's annoying and intrusive at times, but as far as I know, political hacks have never been accused of hacking the rolls during campaign season.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/voter-data-leak-online_us_56818512e4b014efe0d8de3d">Alexander Howard </a>of the Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency advocacy group, has called for tighter restrictions on voter roll access for <i>all</i> entities: for example, requiring submission of a formal Freedom of Information Act request in order to obtain voter information. As it stands now, three states - Alaska, Arkansas and Colorado - impose absolutely no restrictions on who can access the data. Other states impose wait times or charge hefty fees in order to give the voting public a semblance of privacy and protection from bad actors, such as corporate marketers. California prohibits all access to voter information from outside the US, and specifies the information can only be used for political purposes.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Interestingly enough, Colorado is among the handful of states now complaining that its public rolls were "targeted" by Russia, while California denies outright the Homeland Security claim that its database was infiltrated by Russian spies.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Since<a href="https://www.csoonline.com/article/3018592/security/database-configuration-issues-expose-191-million-voter-records.html#tk.rss_all"> a massive breach</a> of national electoral data already occurred in 2015, exposing the personal information of 191 million American voters for anyone in the world to see online, pointing fingers at Russia at this point is a little like complaining about the barn door being left open. If you've ever voted, says Howard, then somewhere out there in cyberspace your name, your address, your gender, your voter ID number, your voting frequency (but not who you voted for) and whether or not you voted in any primary since 2000, is possibly still available free for the taking, by anybody with the tools to search for it. (I purposely did not search for it myself.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">But whatever amplifies and advances the required Narrative which blames Russia and only Russia for abusing voter information and endangering our democracy is A-O.K. by our famously independent mainstream media. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Here's a suggestion from Ludditeville: let's bring back paper registration and paper records and paper ballots, all of which will require actual physical burglaries and physical tampering to complete any espionage and other dirty tricks, just like in the good old Watergate days.</span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-trouble-with-latest-hacking-story.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-3602085759501975117Wed, 07 Feb 2018 17:12:00 +00002018-02-08T14:03:53.814-05:00mutant crayfishCrayfish Girl Power<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"This Mutant Crayfish Clones Itself, and It's Taking Over Europe" reads<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/science/mutant-crayfish-clones-europe.html?ribbon-ad-idx=4&amp;src=trending&amp;module=Ribbon&amp;version=context&amp;region=Header&amp;action=click&amp;contentCollection=Trending&amp;pgtype=article"> the <i>New York Times </i>headline </a>about a rapidly evolving arthropod.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Talk about burying the lede. It's not until several paragraphs later that we learn that the prolific marbled crayfish - also known as the Texas Crayfish - are all females whose enormous batches of eggs contain only immaculately conceived females, or replicas of both Mom and each other. Take that, everybody who is so worried about the alleged #Backlash against the #MeToo movement. I am woman, hear me roar. Or more accurately, I am woman cloned crayfish, so hear me emit a high-pitched chirp out of my <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/science/mutant-crayfish-clones-europe.html?ribbon-ad-idx=4&amp;src=trending&amp;module=Ribbon&amp;version=context&amp;region=Header&amp;action=click&amp;contentCollection=Trending&amp;pgtype=article">scaphognathite</a>.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Not only is it high time we rid the lexicon of the sexist term "crawdaddy," it also might be a good idea to ban men from all future crayfish mating call competitions, especially since the new variety no longer has any need for a mating call.</span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vHqeYKs1kVQ/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vHqeYKs1kVQ?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">From the <i>Times</i> article:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="235" data-total-count="2841"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>For nearly two decades, marbled crayfish have been multiplying like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribble">Tribbles on the legendary “Star Trek” episode</a>. “People would start out with a single animal, and a year later they would have a couple hundred,” said Dr. Lyko.</i></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="418" data-total-count="3259"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Many owners apparently drove to nearby lakes and dumped their marmorkrebs. And it turned out that the marbled crayfish didn’t need to be pampered to thrive. Marmorkrebs established growing populations in the wild, sometimes walking hundreds of yards to reach new lakes and streams. Feral populations started turning up in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia and Ukraine in Europe, and later in Japan and Madagascar.</i></span></div></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">It could always be worse. At least it's not the invasive pet pythons dumped in the Everglades which have developed the ability to clone themselves. Yet.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Plus, crayfish are both edible and easy to catch with one's bare hands. Go to a pond and they will literally swarm around your feet just waiting to be picked up. True, they might pinch your fingers. But what's a little pain compared to the torture of having to constantly pinch pennies at the overpriced supermarket? </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Food snobbery may well become a thing of the past once everybody, men and women alike, no matter their income level, can prepare and consume Crayfish Thermidor or Crayfish Newburg.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Still, gather your crayfish while ye may. It's inevitable that, smelling one more good thing to exploit, venture capitalists and private equity vultures will quickly swoop in to create factory farms out of all the ponds where the crayfish clones have gone forth and multiplied. The thought of an unlimited and free source of self-serve food for the world's hungry people is probably too much for finance capitalists to bear. And since the unlimited future of Marmorkrebs seems pretty much guaranteed, betting on crayfish futures the way a certain former first lady bet and won on cattle futures is already dead in the water.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Capitalism itself never dies. It simply mutates into newer forms, money begetting money out of nothing except itself, and then has the nerve to call itself the Mother of Innovation.&nbsp;</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">So to paraphrase Star Trek's Mr. Spock, may the new crayfish species live long and nurture and prosper and remain impervious to the predatory Klingons of Wall Street. </span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/02/crayfish-girl-power.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-3153995855743413927Mon, 05 Feb 2018 16:06:00 +00002018-02-05T18:40:31.277-05:00molly mckewrussiagate propagandaDisinformation, Neocon-Style<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">It's deja vu all over again. When you look closely at the pushback against the Nunes memo exposing the alleged misuse of the secret FISA Court for political gain or revenge, you begin to see a pattern and a formula.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The propagation of anti-Russian fever is weirdly reminiscent of the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq.&nbsp; That Vladimir Putin is "hacking" our crumbling democracy is as much an article of faith as Saddam Hussein's cache of weapons of mass destruction. The methods by which this faith is being propagated to the American public become especially obvious when you notice that some of the same Iraq War cheerleaders are involved in this latest neocon effort.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The initial public acceptance of the invasion of Iraq, as well as the "belief" of the majority of polled subjects in Russian meddling in the presidential election stays alive thanks largely to the process of<i> amplification.</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The first part of the conflict-creation recipe involves bellicose think tanks and defense industry-beholden politicians planting scary stories in the mainstream media, whose stenographers graciously grant the planters anonymity due to the "sensitivity" of the situation and fears that national security will be threatened if the public gets too much information. The second step is for the warmongers to then point to these planted stories as proof positive that they are full of facts, the actual details of which must unfortunately be withheld to protect the interests of the planters. These two steps are like yeast. They make the disinformation cake rise and rise.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">This is what former Vice President <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/washington/us/the-nuclear-card-the-aluminum-tube-story-a-special-report-how.html">Dick Cheney did in 2002</a>.&nbsp; His office fed <i>New York Times </i>reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon the "scoop" that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium from Africa and using it to build nuclear weapons. Then Cheney went on <i>Meet the Press</i> and pointed to the <i>New York Times</i> as his proof that Saddam did indeed plan to attack the US.&nbsp; To give the disinformation an added dose of verisimilitude, "investigative" reporter Miller even went to jail for a time to protect the powerful sources of the false information. Rather than out herself as a stenographer, she made herself a martyr - until the whole scam fell apart, and she lost her job at the <i>Times.</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Where one neocon bit the dust, however, there are plenty more to take her place. Take, for example, one Molly K. McKew, a self-described "information warfare expert" who got her start in propaganda at the neoconservative <a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Enterprise_Institute">American Enterprise Institute</a>, and went on to lobby Congress on behalf of some of the former Soviet satellite countries whose billionaire leaders she also personally advised, before reinventing herself as a Russophobic pundit on cable TV shows and penning articles for such mainstream organs as<i> Politico</i> and the <i>Washington Post</i>.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">At least McKew, unlike Judith Miller, is honest enough not to pose as an actual investigative journalist. Instead, she modestly gives herself the Orwellian title "narrative architect."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">How does an architect construct a narrative? To get the recipe, just read her latest lengthy, convoluted and alarmist <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/04/trump-twitter-russians-release-the-memo-216935"><i>Politico</i> effort</a>, entitled "How Twitter Bots and Trump Fans made #ReleasetheMemo Go Viral." The main secret ingredient of McKew's concoction is, paradoxically, the exact same process of <i>amplification</i> that she accuses the TrumPutin trolls of employing on Twitter. It takes one to know one, I guess. She liberally links to articles and data that she either dreamed up herself, or that come from like-minded Neocon think tanks, or that are anonymously-sourced articles in the establishment press planted by these same think tanks and revolving-door politicians.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The proof is in the pudding if not in the cake, McKew gloats. You see, Trump decided to release the Nunes memo <i>before he even read it</i>, thanks to the thousands and thousands of <i>#ReleasetheMemo </i>tweets arriving at his desk and those of the "Trumpiest of congressmen" in the past few weeks. It is such a terrible thing when mere trolls have the power to influence such powerful Establishment Influencers.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">McKew further amplifies her <i>Politico</i> message by pointing out that since the mighty <i>Washington Pos</i>t also agrees that Trump and the GOP have been unduly influenced by Russian trolls, it has got to be true. Another term for this propaganda technique is <i>affinity bias,</i> which supplements the endless repetition of boilerplate talking points through the use of an echo chamber.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Since Molly McKew can't blame the twitter campaign directly on Russian trolls, she points to Russian bots who retweeted the messages of actual human Americans, thereby infecting the minds of many other Americans. If this sounds confusing, it is meant to be confusing. She therefore blames the nefarious use of <i>computational propaganda</i>, which she defines as</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>“the use of information and communication technologies to manipulate perceptions, affect cognition, and influence behavior”—has been used, successfully, to manipulate the perceptions of the American public and the actions of elected officials. The analysis below, conducted by our team from the social media intelligence group New Media Frontier, shows that the #releasethememo campaign was fueled by, and likely originated from, computational propaganda. It is critical that we understand how this was done and what it means for the future of American democracy.</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Molly McKew then refers to a number of computational charts of Twitter feeds which derive directly from computerized analyses allegedly conducted both by herself and by former Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff's new neocon think tank, Alliance for Securing Democracy. (<a href="https://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/neocon-democrats-already-blaming-russia.html">I previously wrot</a>e about this war consortium's bogus <i>Hamilton68 Dashboard</i>, which purports to have the Big Brother ability to figure out who is tweeting, what they're tweeting, when they're tweeting, and where they're tweeting it from. Naturally, McKew seizes upon the <i>Dashboard</i> propaganda to further amplify her own argument. Chertoff's organization itself amplified the <i>#ReleasetheMemo</i> amplification frenzy when it planted an article in <i>HuffPo </i>complaining that the hashtag had lost a bit of its oomph during the manufactured government shutdown scare. This piece was where I myself first learned about <i>#ReleasetheMemo</i>.) </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">McKew ultimately undermines her own analysis of "Russian interference" when she is forced to admit that her research revealed that real <i>American</i> human tweeters actually started the memo campaign. What difference does the truth really make at this point? So she is nobly respecting the privacy of the US humans involved. For now, anyway. The implicit message is that you American humans best be careful what you write, lest Putin appropriate your words and you become fair game for eventual unwanted exposure by the Molly McKews of this enterprise.</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>&nbsp;It is computational propaganda—meaning artificially amplified and targeted for a specific purpose—and it dominated political discussions in the United States for days. The #releasethememo campaign came out of nowhere. Its movement from social media to fringe/far-right media to mainstream media so swift that both the speed and the story itself became impossible to ignore. The frenzy of activity spurred lawmakers and the White House to release the Nunes memo, which critics say is a purposeful misrepresentation of classified intelligence meant to discredit the Russia probe and protect the president.</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">McKew further amplifies her own neocon message when she links to the warmongering paranoia of the Atlantic Council, another pro-war think tank at the forefront of fomenting Cold War 2.0 for greatly amplified profits to the weapons manufacturers who own it and operate it.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">We ordinary people are not supposed to know all this, though, because otherwise how could the neocons manufacture our mindless consent for perpetual war and help us to overcome our "sickly inhibitions" against death and destruction on the epic scale that a hot war with Russia would entail?&nbsp; What matters is that we allow the "right" people to manipulate us and make us believe that our leaders really, really care about us. The "Russians," McKew and her fellow disinformation specialists warn us, would have us believe we're all on our own, without a hope and without a prayer.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"And yes," she concludes, "that also reinforces the narrative the Russians have been pushing since 2015: You’re on your own; be angry, and burn things down. Would that a leader would step into this breech, and challenge the advancing victory of the bots and the cynical people behind them."</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">It takes a professional Narrative Architect like McKew to construct a Potemkin Village made out of Mom and apple pie, with the American flag being the only drapery you'll ever need to protect your privacy and your lives.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">A prolific tweeter herself, McKew amplified her message even more today by plugging her own appearances on both <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/02/05/583293454/the-digital-backstory-of-the-much-debated-gop-memo-on-the-fbi">NPR </a>and MSNBC to further warn Americans about the dangers of unsanctioned amplification. For super-duper amplification, the New York Times' David Leonhardt graciously plugged her piece in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/opinion/the-flying-pets-scam.html">his column</a>. She'll even be appearing at SXSW in Austin next month to amplify her paranoid brand to music fans.&nbsp;</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Meanwhile, the Republicans' cynical can of worms which I wrote about in my previous post is already on its way to being pried open thanks to Donald Trump's "unprecedented" attack on the surveillance state. The <i>Times</i> has filed suit, demanding that the entire transcript of the FISA matter regarding Carter Page be opened to public scrutiny. In ordering the cherry-picked Nunes memo declassified, Trump probably unwittingly opened a legal door toward more transparency. This is likely the real reason that the Neocon alliance was gnashing its teeth over a nonexistent threat to national security.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">***</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Further reading on Molly McKew and her Manichean mindset and possible grift:</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Meet Molly McKew, War Lobbyist and Hero of #TheResistance, <a href="http://washingtonbabylon.com/meet-molly-mckew-war-lobbyist-and-hero-of-theresistance/"><i>Washington Babylon.&nbsp; </i></a></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">A New Cold War Against Russia is a Terrible Idea, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/139600/new-cold-war-russia-terrible-idea"><i>New Republic.</i></a></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">American Says She Was Hounded Out of Moldova by Pro-Russian Politician,<i> <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/american-says-she-was-hounded-out-of-moldova-by-pro-russian?utm_term=.ei4mXBo8j#.bo49baRln">Buzzfeed</a></i></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">***</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">I've been reading Robert Coover's brilliant but underappreciated, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-burning.html">maligned</a>, and even repressed account (<i>The Public Burning</i>) of Cold War 1.0 and the Rosenberg executions. One passage in particular struck me, because it so perfectly captures the "zeitgeist" of RussiaGate, and why so many otherwise intelligent people are falling for the "narrative architecture" being amplified by Molly McKew and her compatriots in government and media.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Speaking as an imaginary Richard Nixon, Coover writes that there was</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>"... an almost Wagnerian scope to the prosecution's presentation, incorporating many of the major issues of our times, whether or not relevant to the crime charged; the sense throughout that this was clearly a struggle between the forces of good and evil... and a lot of pretty fair spy stories to the bargain, if the prosecution was to be believed: secret codenames, recognition signals, covert drop sites, escape plans, cover stories, payoffs, cat-and-mouse games with FBI surveillance teams, border intrigues. But there was more to it than that. Not only was everybody on this case from the Judge on down - indeed, just about everyone in the nation, in and out of government myself included - behaving like actors caught up in a play, but we all seemed moreover to be aware of just what we were doing and at the same time of our inability, committed as we were to some higher purpose, some larger script as it were, to do otherwise. Even the Rosenbergs seemed to be swept up in this sense of an embracing and compelling drama."</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">And further,</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>"And then what if, I wondered, there were no spy ring at all? What if all these characters believed there was and acted out their parts on this assumption, a whole courtroom full of fantasists? Certainly most of them had a gift for inventing themselves - or as they'd say in the CIA and KGB, for elaborating their covers - maybe, helplessly, they just dreamed it all up. Whereupon the Rosenbergs, thinking everybody was crazy, nevertheless fell for it, moving ineluctably into the martyr roles they'd been waiting for all along, eager to be admired and their heroism and their loyalty to the cause of their friends, some of whom, they were certain (the FBI said there was a spy ring, there had to be one) were members of the alleged conspiracy"</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">RussiaGate hysteria will live on until war breaks out, or until a Democratic-Neocon majority again takes over Congress and the White House and things can can get back to a semblance of normal: in other words, respectful bipartisanship and fairness and collegiality in love and secret war and tons of money. Nobody wants to give up his place on the stage at this point, because doing so would be both heresy and an admission of fraud, not to mention a career-buster. It's all a show. We are either complicit actors, unwilling spectators, or outright traitors to the Narrative Cause if we refuse to become properly cowed and afraid. We are simply not allowed to despise Donald Trump if we don't also firmly believe that he is a Putin puppet. We must pledge allegiance to the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, if only because Trump is treating them so nastily. His insulting Tweets are deemed by the Miss Manners crowd to be so much worse than his real crimes, such as extrajudicial drone assassinations of civilians, which have now already overtaken those of his predecessor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The one weapon we do still have is to relentlessly expose "consultants" like Molly McKew for exactly who they are: war profiteers. As ever, simply follow the money.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/02/disinformation-neocon-style.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-8449791609137781452Fri, 02 Feb 2018 16:14:00 +00002018-02-03T08:25:59.866-05:00fbifisa courtnunes memoHappy Groundhog Day<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">It's official. There will be six more weeks of winter because this is a science and reality-based community, and when The Groundhog sees his shadow, we gotta believe his predictions. Otherwise we would not be patriotic Americans.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_X-Files">The X-Files</a> is back on TV, as you may have heard. Before they came out of hibernation last year in the wake of the Trump election, our intrepid FBI agents were last seen on the tube in 2002, chasing their ghosts and aliens. George W. Bush had just taken office, and the creepy Deep State at the center of the series was still just a paranoid dream. The tinfoil hat ethos of the show now seems kind of quaint and cozy, what with the Snowden revelations and the Patriot Act and the anti-democratically secret FISA court and Trump's ravings about aliens hiding under every bed and scaling every imaginary wall.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">And how the tables have turned. The ultra-right wing of the Uniparty has suddenly has gone all renegade ACLU and demanded that our civil rights to due process and privacy be protected. Sure, the GOP just cares about the rights of Boss Trump, and not even remotely about ours. But once they open their cynical can of worms via the so-called Nunes Memo, who knows what unintended good consequences might ensue?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">House Republicans will apparently use the so-called Rule X to release their doctored version of the X-Files, whereupon the "apolitical" FBI will be forced to defend itself, and so on, and ad infinitum, while the Democrats flail and wail and as much as admit that they are powerless hacks in thrall to the Military-Industrial Complex.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">As <a href="https://jonathanturley.org/2018/02/02/man-from-rule-x-the-house-intelligence-chair-invokes-long-overdue-power-to-override-agencies-on-a-public-release/">Jonathan Turley writes</a> about the obscure Rule X,</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Indeed, the rule has come to mean the very opposite of its language. Subsection 11(g) has never been used in countless conflicts with intelligence agencies which simply refused to declassify information. That lack of use of has reaffirmed the widely held view of congressional committees being “captured” by the agencies they are supposed to oversee. The intelligence committees have a steady revolving door of staff between Congress and the agencies. Moreover, members often use closed sessions to remove embarrassing conflicts or scandals from the public view.</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>This is why the vote on Jan. 18 to activate Subsection 11(g) was accompanied by a virtual “Wilhelm scream” heard from Capitol Hill to Langley to Quantico. The “Man From Rule X” may be a somewhat flawed character, as to his motivations in taking this step. However, regardless of the content of the memo, the act of defiance under this rule has been too long in coming.</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Bring it on. Just because The Groundhog retreated back to hibernation doesn't mean that we have to. If he saw his shadow, at least that means that there is still some sunlight out there. It's high time that Rule X was used for the purpose for which it was intended and not as a convenient P.R. fig leaf to disguise the fact that our government's boastful version of "transparency" has long meant its exact opposite.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">So who knows? As much as the gospel of trickle-down prosperity sold by the right wing Uniparty is a complete sham, the idea of trickle-down transparency is yet to be tested. The truth is out there, somewhere.</span><br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xMkz_4M9ZdA/WnSMKonIOMI/AAAAAAAAGoY/MXAG7v95WS0PJAQHGgfvnwq0gVo67H7zwCLcBGAs/s1600/groundhog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="266" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xMkz_4M9ZdA/WnSMKonIOMI/AAAAAAAAGoY/MXAG7v95WS0PJAQHGgfvnwq0gVo67H7zwCLcBGAs/s400/groundhog.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Wake Me When It's Over</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">*Update: <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/370599167/FISA-Memo#from_embed">The memo is now officially Out There.</a></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">It wasn't read into the Congressional Record via Rule X after all, but simply declassified by the White House for immediate release. Nobody upstages Trump. But at least the truth that there is a Rule X, and that the congressional intelligence flacks can release whatever they want as long as it's during an open session is now Out There. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">How the memo itself relates to and/or avoids the whole or actual truth is yet to be determined, given that this is still very much an intra-establishment political battle in dire need of some anti-partisan outside analysis and more independent journalism. But that the discredited Steele "Golden Showers" dossier was allegedly presented to the FISA Court by the FBI without disclosing to the judge that it was paid-for private political opposition research does have the ring of truth to it. The Democratic-Surveillance State machine will be questioned and forced to defend itself in public, and these self-described Trump resistance fighters will absolutely hate being put in any kind of corner. It looks as if the phony "national security" excuse for politicians doing horrible things could be about to collapse under its own weight. Stay tuned!</span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/02/happy-groundhog-day.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-6936900513471916150Wed, 31 Jan 2018 16:26:00 +00002018-01-31T13:49:09.782-05:00donald trumpstate of the unionState of the Bunion, With Heel Spurs<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Since much of Donald Trump's speech to the Congressional Joint last night consisted of his own hands, Mussolini-like, clapping for himself, and his&nbsp; frequent pauses to look around and see who was applauding him, the reviews saying this was one of the longest harangues of its type are misleading.</span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JP9p81Vz0Yg/WnHvizk9hcI/AAAAAAAAGoI/gvB_dPQ78uU2uEQJ-rljb3e3lYT7IvEgwCLcBGAs/s1600/trump%2Bsotu.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="266" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JP9p81Vz0Yg/WnHvizk9hcI/AAAAAAAAGoI/gvB_dPQ78uU2uEQJ-rljb3e3lYT7IvEgwCLcBGAs/s400/trump%2Bsotu.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Before I get into the rancid meat of the speech, let's get the fashion sidebar out of the way first. Paul Ryan wore a suitably lighter shade of blue tie than Trump's, although he did botch his own opening line: "I preven-- present the president of the United States!"</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">First Lady Melania chose the Hillary Clinton nominating convention look: a blinding white pantsuit. There are already plenty of articles on the possible cultural symbolism and hidden meanings of this choice of couture, so I won't bother. As I previously reported, the Democratic ladies borrowed their style from the Golden Globe ladies, and wore funereal black. Nobody shouted "Shut up!" or otherwise disrupted the spectacle - which is, after all, the political equivalent of Hollywood's own multi-part orgy of theatrical self-congratulation. There were one or two nonverbal outbursts that sounded like projectile vomiting, which I swear came from my TV and not from me or my pet goldfish.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Now, to the speech. If I were asked to give it a title, it'd be a toss-up between "It's Always Sunny When You Got Somebody To Hate" or&nbsp; "It'll Take a Trillion-Dollar Military Industrial Complex To Crush One Little Latino Gang From Long Guyland."</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">No way, as the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/30/us/politics/sotu-trump.html?hp&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=a-lede-package-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news"><i>New York Times</i></a> cheerfully posited in its usual insane deference to the "occasion" of the S.O.T.U. if not the man, was this an appeal for "unity,"&nbsp; unless a more cohesive jelly mold of fear and hatred was what Trump had in mind.&nbsp; When read rather than listened to, in fact, it sounds like many bullshitting presidential victory laps of hope which came before it.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Here's my interpretation (his actual words are in italicized quotes.)</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">America is a lot like Dante's trilogy, folks. There's both a heaven and a hell and maybe a purgatory, but I've never really been one for centrism, so I'll keep maniacally spinning from hell to heaven and back again throughout this diatribe. If there is anything I'm a master at, it's keeping people so seriously off-balance they won't know what's really hitting them until it's way too late.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Ordinary people look out for ordinary people. Because America is a bootstrapping nation which hasn't had a safety net for so long there's no need to even talk about it in this speech.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">So, thank you, Mr. Helicopter Rescuer in the audience, for being a human prop next to the White Pantsuit Supermodel, so we don't have to talk about how the government has turned its back on the people of Puerto Rico and <i>"the Harvey."</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Thank you, too, Mr. Firefighter dude for rescuing 60 people from the Inferno in California. It only goes to prove that just because you're trapped in a raging fire you don't necessary die from it.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. Congresscritter Steve Scalise, who proved that just because you get shot along with many other people every single day in America, you can come out of your own trial by fire looking just fantastic, 10 years younger in fact, all because of our great health care system. (Scalise jumps to his feet to prove it and he even blows a two-handed macho Hollywood-style kiss to the president. Because gun ownership for anybody and everybody is what America is truly all about. This happy-ending shooting proved we are one great big happy country-family.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>"If there is an opportunity, we seize it."</i> Because predation and greed are what we're all about.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Even though wages are stagnating, I'll do like all my predecessors did and insist they're rising. Plus, since I can't get Jay-Z calling me a germ out of my head, I'll dig in a little deeper and claim that black people have never had it better. Also Wall Street is booming, which is great for the pension accounts it's appropriated until the bubble bursts and somebody who is not a billionaire loses their shirt, their house, and maybe even an eye.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">So anyway, here's a shout-out to Steve and Sandy, who own a small factory in Ohio.&nbsp; Also to their black employee, an all-American welder who is a great welder because his bosses told me he was. You think I personally have the time to look at his welding? So that's another racist dog-whistle completed, sending the message that black people are either uppity Jay-Zs, or not hard-working enough to score a seat next to the White Pantsuit Goddess. How can I be a racist when I highlight a black guy on my special night?</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>"If you work hard, if you believe in yourself, if you believe in America, then you can dream anything, you can be anything, and together, we can achieve anything." </i>This is a subtle dig at the 800,000 Dreamers, in the vein of critics who counter the Black Lives Matter Movement with "all lives matter." Trump hammers down on this "dream" theme several more times during his speech.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>"In America, we know that faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are the center of the American life. Our motto is 'in God we trust.'”</i> (At this point the camera pans to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who is caught applauding this line as robotically as any spellbound person who has ever been positively conditioned throughout life to loaded buzzwords and thus avoid thinking of how this country has always used the tropes of God and family to inflict a whole lot of Infernos both here and abroad.)</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>"And we celebrate our police, our military, and our amazing veterans as heroes who deserve our total and unwavering support."</i> If you question endless war for profit, or complain about police brutality, you're not a real (white) American.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">On that Orwellian note, here's another shout-out to a human prop. Young 12-year-old Preston up there, sitting right next to the White Pantsuit Goddess, started a movement to plant 40,000 flags on the graves of soldiers. Because unlike flowers, flags never die. <i>"Young patriots like Preston teach all of us about our civic duty as Americans. Preston’s reverence for those who have served our Nation reminds us why we salute our flag, why we put our hands on our hearts for the pledge of allegiance, <b class="g-highlight" data-annotation="This appears to be a veiled shot at one of Mr. Trump’s past targets: NFL players who kneel during the national anthem before games in protest of police brutality and racial oppression." data-image="" data-reporter="Nicholas Fandos, Congressional Correspondent">and why we proudly stand for the national anthem</b>."</i> Naturally, this was a dig at the mainly black athletes who have taken a knee in protest of racism at football games. Nothing like using a nice little kid as your racist cudgel, eh, Trumpolini?</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Now it's on to the appointment of conservative judges who will allow people to keeping buying more guns because the Second Amendment rules. A quick pan to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch doesn't elicit any emotion whatsoever.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>&nbsp;"All Americans deserve accountability and respect – and that is what we are giving them. So tonight, I call on the Congress to empower every Cabinet Secretary with the authority to reward good workers – and to remove Federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people."</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Naturally, as the Underminer-in-Chief, this new rule would not apply to Donald J. Trump. But it'd be nice to see Congress take him at his word, just for fun.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Now it's on to the manufacture of more gas-guzzling, fuel-inefficient cars to keep the wheels of Capitalism grinding on until the whole planet erupts into one Dante's Inferno after another.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">But before that happens, Trump wants terminal cancer patients to stop schlepping from country to country in search of a quack cure when they should easily have "access" to untested therapies right here in the Homeland.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Also, Trump has directed his new HHS secretary, fresh from the profiteering pharma industry, to <i>"fix the injustice of high drug prices."</i>&nbsp; He might mean the injustice to the drug industry of laws against price-fixing, which prevent them from conspiring to raise and fix prices to even higher levels than they are already.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"> On to infrastructure improvement, a meaningless suggestion which seems to come up at every S.O.T.U. speech. Private corporations will not sink any money into such a thing, because it's risky and the returns are slower than would be gleaned by simply gambling with customers' money and making more money off of money than off of things. And no president in recent memory has ever suggested that public works projects actually be totally public. Where there is no profit motive, there is just no American way.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>"We want every American to know the dignity of a hard day’s work. We want every child to be safe in their home at night. And we want every citizen to be proud of this land that we love.</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i> </i><i>We can lift our citizens from welfare to work, from dependence to independence, and from poverty to prosperity."</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Notice he doesn't say that he wants every child to have guaranteed health care and a guaranteed public education. He does want every child to be afraid of "foreigners" who make them feel so jittery in their beds at night after they see his inflammatory Tweets. And ominously, he hints at more social<i> </i>safety net cuts to come in some very neoliberal language: "lifting" people from welfare to work and implying that poverty is some sort of cultural problem or individual foible. This is another classic racist and misogynistic dog-whistle employed mainly by the GOP, but also echoed by the Democrats' offerings of "ladders of opportunity."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Now it's on to fulminating the discredited trope of the "trickle-down" prosperity to be unleashed by the massive tax cuts for the rich. Oh, but let's throw in some paid family leave, because that's the pet project of Daughter Ivanka, a registered Democrat until Daddy ran for president.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Finally we get to the real rancid offal of the speech: Keep All Latino Furners Out with our big, beautiful fantastic border wall. To help him make his point, Trump points to a couple more human props whose children were killed by the notorious MS-13 Gang on Long Guyland. And then, using the old divide and conquer propaganda technique, Trump wags an approving digit at a Latino ICE agent who is patriotic enough to go after his own ethnic group.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Now that he got that out of the way, he doubles down on ending the visa lottery and thus barring immigrants from what he infamously called "shithole countries." And he again lies about so-called chain migration allowing any immigrants' distant relatives to get a free ticket into the country.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Next, he tiptoes around the crisis of opioid addiction by telling the heartwarming story of a compassionate Christian cop who adopted the baby of a heroin addict. The implicit message here is that there will always be people to care for the children of addicts, so the government and the oligarchs raking in the dough don't have to worry about it. Because if the children of powerful people become addicted, there are plenty of pricey rehab hospitals to take them in while other addicts either die in the streets, or go through withdrawal in overcrowded prisons, or some stranger comes along to "lift them up." </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Would it be a proper S.O.T.U. if Trump didn't also demand unlimited Congressional funding for an already bloated military machine? Naturally, this last symphonic movement elicited the requisite fascistic chorus of<i> USA!USA!USA! </i>as a worthy substitute for fireworks and clashing cymbals. To get the crowd adrenaline flowing, he gushes over two soldiers who helped evacuate a hospital booby-trapped by ISIS explosives, because, as they would have us believe, American soldiers never, ever commit civilian atrocities. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">And just in case you still had any doubts that the US military is planning a continuation (it never officially ended) of the Korean War, they should have dissipated with Trump's introduction of his final human prop, a North Korean refugee who lost a leg and whose family was forced to eat dirt helping him to flee to freedom. He further strove to overcome our sickly inhibitions about another war with the evening's most heartless use of human props - the parents of Otto Warmbier, who was apparently tortured by North Koreans before they released him back to the States, where he died of irreparable brain damage - although with the lack of an autopsy, the cause of death was never established.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">This country belongs to the police and the military, Trump bellowed.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Is it a coup yet?<br /></span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/shorter-sotu.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-5008967431373363179Sun, 28 Jan 2018 21:29:00 +00002018-01-29T11:21:37.297-05:00celebrity protestdemocratic partyneoliberalismtrump resistanceCommercialized Resistance Is Futile<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Wealthy entertainers, hijacking social protest in the Age of Trump, have now declared themselves The People. They are not to be confused with the brave but often marginalized and ignored people who have struggled for justice throughout our nation's history.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Move over, all you inheritors of Eugene Debs and Rosa Parks. Because the "Industry" has got this covered. It's all under control. You see, the newest role of famous actors and musicians and other media personalities is to turn the often bloody and violent struggles for racial justice and workers' rights and human rights into one star-studded entertainment diversion after another. Rather than protest in the streets yourselves, all you have to do is sit back and watch celebrities pretend to do it for you on TV. And if you're very lucky, you can even be a member of the live studio audience or even an extra on the stage.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Just as the Women's March franchise was partly the brainchild of affiliates of the Conde Nast publishing empire, the wider #Resistance (to Trump, the whole Trump, and nothing but the Trump) is itself the product of the Media-Political-Entertainment Complex.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">To that end, a gaggle of glamorous millionaires is staging a "People's State of the Union" as an alternative to Trump's speech to the Congressional Joint this Tuesday night. So as not to deflect attention from centrist Democrat Joseph Kennedy III's official rebuttal to Trump, the&nbsp; A-Listers are holding their own "prebuttal" event on Monday night in New York City, where a lot of them were already in town for the Grammy Awards.<b>*</b> To be fair to them, though, they're not actually marketing their gala at the tony Town Hall venue as a protest, but as a "celebration." It's an occasion for all virtue-signalers to bask in the solidarity, narrowly defined as their mutual hatred for Donald Trump.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">As progressive actor <a href="http://people.com/politics/mark-ruffalo-event-trump-state-of-the-union-address/">Mark Ruffalo dished</a> to the celebrity gossip rag <i>People, </i>the restrictive purpose of all these celebrity events is to get out the vote for the Democratic Party, which only recently purged people-intensive populists from all its leadership positions.</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>“In essence,” Ruffalo tells PEOPLE of the event, “it’s a better reflection of our state of the union based on a more populist point of view, based on the people’s point of view. I think it’s important because we have a president who has a difficult time with the truth, who has a radical, divisive agenda, and spends an enormous amount of time focusing on the negative and hopelessness and despair.”</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The agenda, therefore, is not for the wealthy entertainers to demand protections for the most vulnerable people, but to help the most vulnerable people feel better about their situations, possibly by viewing more movies and TV shows about vulnerable people prevailing over hatred, discrimination and poverty through dint of their own humor, hard work, and all-American pluck.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Above all, the #Resistance events are about the activist Beautiful People celebrating <i>themselves: </i></span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>&nbsp;“We want to <b>celebrate</b> this moment that we’re in of what is now probably one of the most influential and powerful and really <b>beautiful</b> movements to come into play in the United States since the civil rights movement,” Ruffalo explains, going on to describe the event as “a <b>celebration</b> of the power and the <b>beauty</b> of this movement, but also o<b>f our accomplishments</b> and to focus on what’s to come in the immediate future.”</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"It's the Mother of All Movements," he added modestly.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The announced host of Monday night's Celebrity Activist Apprentice reality show is yet another Democratic Party offshoot called <i>We Stand United</i> (not to be confused with the main financial backer, <i>Stand Up America</i>, a 501 (c) (4) bankrolled by the Facebook wealth of failed billionaire carpetbagger <a href="https://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-billionaires-pledge-to-lowly.html">Sean Eldridge</a>.) For the full A-List roster of performers, check out the <i>People</i> link above, because the last thing that these People probably need or want is more publicity, even publicity on an obscure little lefty blog.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Led by a former Clinton campaign operative, <i>Stand Up America</i> was also at the "grassroots" forefront of <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/332795-progressive-group-urges-senators-to-support-independent-commission-on-russia">urging Congress</a> to establish an independent commission investigating Russian "election-meddling" in the wake of Trump's firing last year of FBI Director James Comey - who had only recently been evoking the wrath of Clintonites for dredging up the private server-Anthony Weiner mess just weeks before the 2016 election. The enemy of their enemy so conveniently becomes their friend in the interests of the fortunes of The Party.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Meanwhile, what would commercialized protest be without the solidarity engendered by shopping? No anarchist black hats or Guy Fawkes masks will be tolerated at any sanctioned and capitalized <strike>protest</strike> celebratory gathering. The must-have item currently for sale on the <i>Stand Up America</i> website is a tee shirt emblazoned with the bold words "It's Mueller Time!" - because goodness knows, the Number One priority of the desperate one-fifth of Americans who now live near or below the poverty line is <i>RussiaRussiaRussia.</i></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Then the commercial resistance marketplace seems to have run out of righteous steam in a hurry, because all I could find were shirts and buttons and bumper stickers&nbsp; labeled with "Resist" or for double the fun, "Resist. Persist." For only $24, you can score the Lady Liberty super-saver combo package, complete with a <i>quartet</i> of Resist buttons plus a shirt to pin them on for the sake of patriotic redundancy.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PHPWlgYYci0/Wm4kkvL66bI/AAAAAAAAGn4/XzpaKwVanqMOksmHyq-wfjV3Px-9B1tCwCLcBGAs/s1600/lady_combo_600x600.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PHPWlgYYci0/Wm4kkvL66bI/AAAAAAAAGn4/XzpaKwVanqMOksmHyq-wfjV3Px-9B1tCwCLcBGAs/s320/lady_combo_600x600.png" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;Meanwhile, you will be happy to learn that the Women's March anniversary souvenir book "Together We Rise," is now ranked #5 on the <i>New York Times</i> bestseller list. I was lucky enough to be first in line to score my free ebook version (via the New York Public Library and its crushing partnership with the ubiquitous rentier monopoly Amazon) of the $30 list-price volume.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Sadly, though, I have been unable to complete my reading to give you a full review at this time. Maybe it was the immediate shout-outs by the Women's March organizers to Facebook and Google, which helped jump-start the <i>Operation Headcount "</i>efficiencies"<i> </i>of the event<i>. </i>Maybe it was the fact that the protests were planned in the pricey Watergate Hotel and underwritten by Conde Nast, also the publisher of the new book. Maybe it was the hat-tip to professional MSNBC Russophobe Rachel Maddow, who supplied a huge chunk of the corporate-sponsored publicity. And since, for security reasons, only clear plastic backpacks were to be allowed at the D.C. event, the ubiquitous rentier Amazon quickly came to the monopolistic rescue and sold millions of cheap plastic backpacks to the marchers. Don't even get me started on pink pussy hats and the pink yarn shortage, which caused a big price spike for that color. Because, capitalism.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">At least the organizers admitted that the initial, if not the core, purpose of the march was to give Hillary Clinton voters their moment of catharsis.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">A few quotes in the intro jumped right out at me, and not in a particularly good way:</span><i><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;</span></i><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"I kept running into Trump supporters and <b>many Russians</b> in the hotel and thought, Is this real?" remembers one organizer."</span></i></blockquote><blockquote>&nbsp;<i><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"Hillary asked us 'How can I be helpful? Can I tweet in support of the Women's March?' We said, 'Absolutely.' So that day, she actually tweeted in support of us."</span></i></blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Now, to be fair, <i>Together We Rise</i> does flesh itself out with quite a few previously published or re-purposed essays by feminists, so I'll refrain from passing too harsh a judgment on the book until I've developed enough resistance to lurking treacle to finish the whole thing.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Sadly, I didn't see anything by<a href="https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/a-feminism-where-leaning-in-means-leaning-on-others/"> Nancy Fraser</a> or for that matter, any radical feminist, in the table of contents. So as an alternative, I would highly recommend her <i>Fortunes of Feminism</i> for a collection of scathing critiques exploring how the feminist movement has both been hijacked by, and has willingly colluded with, the profit-intensive ideology of neoliberalism. This current "wave" of anti-Trump feminism remains true to valorizing "the politics of recognition" over struggles for economic justice. The commercialized <i>#Resistance</i> is also virtually identical to the platform of the centrist, corporatized Democratic Party, in that both studiously ignore the need for redistributive economic policies, a fight which was at the very heart of the original leftist feminist movements, both in the US and internationally.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"The two-dimensional character of gender wreaks havoc on an either/or choice between the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition, because it assumes that women are either a class or a status group, but not both," writes Nancy Fraser.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Rather than simply "resisting Trump," the Left, what's still left of it, must not only resist getting sucked into the anodyne Hollywood version of protest but also embrace Fraser's suggested motto: "No redistribution without recognition, and no recognition without redistribution."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">When the rich and the famous and the powerful posture as agents of social change and protest, everyday people and their everyday concerns are tacitly left out. The idea is that we can simply watch everything on TV: switching channels between the odious Trump reality show, and the mind-numbing liberal reality show.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Take, for example, the Democratic Party's choice of the person to officially rebut Trump after the State of the Union spectacular. Rep. Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts will <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/28/kennedy-state-of-the-union-response-rebuttal-curse-216542">make his national TV debut</a> as the party's latest rising star and savior. (Oprah bowed out.)&nbsp; He's certainly got the name and the looks and the bathetic dynastic mystique. Other than that, he has <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40234-single-payer-health-care-is-seeing-record-support-in-congress">refused to co-sponsor </a>the Medicare for All legislation now pending in the lower House. He is also a fiscally conservative deficit hawk in the vein of the oligarch-friendly Clintonian Third Way. And why not? Young Kennedy has collected more than $1 million in campaign contributions from the shadow banking lobby, with his top individual donors<a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/summary?cid=N00034044&amp;cycle=CAREER"> listed on Open Secrets</a> as Harvard University, Crescent Capital Group, Nixon Peabody, Bank of America, and Bain Capital.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">So I think we can probably forget about any talk of economic redistribution during his rebuttal. As a matter of fact, his speech should mesh quite nicely with those delivered by the celebrity-soaked "People's" State of Union event on the preceding night.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Stay tuned, and don't forget to pass the stale popcorn. Even better, consider cutting the official content/delivery cord to give your brain a fighting chance to actually think.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><b>*</b> <b>Update, 1/29</b>: The surprise guest star of <a href="http://variety.com/2018/music/awards/hillary-clinton-reads-fire-and-fury-at-the-grammys-watch-1202679822/">last night's Grammy show</a> was Hillary Clinton, reading a selection from the anti-Trump breviary, <i>Fire and Fury,</i> and of course appealing to the mainly young TV audience of potential voters. This attempt at hipsterism worked out so well for her when Jay-Z and Beyonce threw her that election eve concert in Michigan! But make no mistake: Hillary is still the heart and soul, not to mention much of the monetized power, of the Democratic Party and its "resistance" franchise. Don't ask me why this is, because I honestly don't know. She maintains her access to the public stage as some sort of great national feminist symbol, even right in the wake of some old but embarrassing news<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/opinion/hillary-clinton-sexual-harassment.html"> about a predatory campaign faith adviser she once slapped on the wrist.</a> So it's more than apparent that Trump fans are not the only ones plagued by a cult mentality of authoritarianism. This is the thing that the citizens of this country must actually resist.</span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/commercialized-resistance-is-futile.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-6358342040957252163Fri, 26 Jan 2018 15:08:00 +00002018-01-28T12:30:40.073-05:00davosgreed golden toilettrumpThe Artifice of the Deal: Extract and Excrete<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">I half-expected the squadron of military helicopters to start strafing panic-stricken Alpine tourists as it bore Donald Trump to his Davos destination the other day. The sight of the droning machines on the bleak Swiss horizon has been aptly compared to the famous opening scene of <i>Apocalypse Now</i>. The more recent highly scripted scene lacked only the Wagnerian soundtrack to augment the sense of looming shock and awe, mayhem and insanity.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">But not to worry. Because for all his populist rhetoric, Trump loves the plutocrats gathering at their annual confab of greed and do-goodery as much as they love them right back. All talk of Russian collusion, porn actresses, the attempted firing of Robert Mueller, dementia, and corruption took a back seat as Trump took center stage to soak up the genteel love he's been craving his entire professional life. The richest of the richest gripped their turned-up noses with one hand as they grasped their Trumpian tax reform windfalls with the other.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Save for the occasional theatrical boo from the rafters, everybody seemed very satisfied and happy. It shockingly turns out that the anti-Trump resistance is nothing but a big act to deflect the attention of the screwed-over masses from the real complicity and the real collusion: that of Trump with the global financial elite and the self-professed "thought leaders" among them.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Even the <i>New York Times,</i> whose own revenue and readership have reportedly skyrocketed from the <i>#Resistance </i>franchise, was willing to at least partially bury the hatchet as the artless Trump and the artsy Davos crowd did their intersectional thing. For when it comes to the rich growing richer (and buying more<i> Times</i> ads) Trump is just one of those necessary evils to gloss over when the glossing's good - for the extremely rich, that is:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="407" data-total-count="1245"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Rather than confrontation, both sides labored for conciliation, at least to a point. For one afternoon and evening, at least, Mr. Trump threw no protectionist grenades and even broached the possibility, however remote, that he would re-enter a Pacific trade agreement that he scrapped last year, if it were renegotiated. For its part, the Davos crowd welcomed its top critic with a reception and warm words.</i></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="259" data-total-count="1504" id="story-continues-1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>The mood was strikingly different from a year ago, when Mr. Trump was about to take office and the globalists meeting in this mountaintop getaway reeled in shock, panicked that his campaign promises meant the end of the movement they had nurtured for decades.</i></span></div></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>&nbsp;A year later, many of the business and political elites remain dismissive of him, privately rolling eyes and using words like “madman,” but there was excitement about economic growth, and the tax cuts and regulatory rollback he has ushered in.</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">As long as one can roll one's eyes and tut-tut about Queens accents while raking in the dough, all is right with the world. One can save one's Botoxed face and resist gravity as one valiantly pretends to abhor and resist Trump. For when it comes to unmitigated greed, snobbery conveniently cancels itself right out with just the right injection of reverse snobbery.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;Peter Baker, chief interpretative scribe of the <i>Times's</i> palace beat, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/world/europe/donald-trump-davos-speech.html?src=twr">enthused </a></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">that that wascally wabbit turned his fluffy little tail and <i>reassured</i> the panic-stricken oligarchs. And why not, since his "sober" speech was mostly written by Gary Cohn, his in-house Goldman Sachs advisor? The populist version of Trump will make its next gala appearance next week at the State of the Union speech, said to be the product of the ultra-right xenophobic wing of the White House, aka Stephen Miller. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Meanwhile, one can always rely upon CNN, MSNBC, the <i>Washington Post</i> and the <i>Times</i> to dish the necessary dirt about how many Russian oligarchs are meeting secretly with the Trump contingent right out in the open, in front of the TV cameras and before our very eyes. The Russophobic narrative must be kept alive, albeit as a side-issue, as capitalists of all nations collude and connive in the spirit of good, global neoliberalism.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">This go-round, liberal billionaire George Soros graciously played Good Cop to give cover to his fellow oligarchs as they all groveled before Trump. From the <i>Times</i>:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="199" data-total-count="5484"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>At a separate dinner on Thursday night, George Soros, the liberal financial trader and philanthropist, called Mr. Trump the vanguard of a new wave of authoritarian rulers that threatens open society.</i></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="162" data-total-count="5646"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>“The survival of our entire civilization is at stake,” said Mr. Soros, while pointing a finger at “the rise of leaders like Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump.”</i></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="277" data-total-count="5923"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>In the days before Mr. Trump’s arrival, the leaders of India, Canada, France and Germany used a series of high-profile speeches to mount an aggressive defense of the global trading system, while other officials worried that Mr. Trump and other nationalists posed grave risks.</i></span></div></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Back in the USA, meanwhile, comic relief in high places abounds. <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/guggenheim-offered-trump-gold-toilet-requested-van-gogh-article-1.3779296">Word is now out</a> that when the Trumps requested a loan from the Guggenheim of a Vincent Van Gogh painting - <i>Landscape With Snow</i> -&nbsp; to display in the private White House residence, the museum made them a snarky counter-offer of the solid gold toilet satirically titled <i>America.&nbsp; </i>This iconic sculpture actually gives a whole new meaning to so-called shithole countries.</span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--r2-MHsJJcU/WmtEGkU66uI/AAAAAAAAGno/7PhkL0RYRwAMnwrXPmzyJoYBiY1ysHXegCLcBGAs/s1600/golden%2Btoilet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="224" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--r2-MHsJJcU/WmtEGkU66uI/AAAAAAAAGno/7PhkL0RYRwAMnwrXPmzyJoYBiY1ysHXegCLcBGAs/s400/golden%2Btoilet.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The artsy-fartsy offer made perfect sense. For one thing, the 18-carat gold toilet cost sculptor Maurizio Cattelan (or his investors) more than $1 million to make. And since oligarchs like Trump love to posture as "makers" rather than takers, what better seat of power could he possibly desire?</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Sadly, Trump turned down the offer. Maybe it had something to do with thousands of Guggenheim visitors having previously used the fully functional commode. No amount of Lysol or reams of paper covering could ever properly sanitize it for the Germophobe-in-Chief's protection. Or maybe it was just because he already has a couple of toilets in higher quality 24-carat gold encrusted with diamonds and rubies.&nbsp;</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">More likely though, Trump, like most mortals, prefers comfort over style in his most intimate excretory moments. Therefore, he's probably installed at least one <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/technology/personaltech/kohlers-numi-is-everything-one-wants-in-a-toilet-and-more.html">Numi toilet </a>in each of his many residences. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">For one thing, if one is male, one's urinary stream is guided by the Numi's blue laser light so as to avoid groggy mishaps in the middle of the night. </span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">There's no need to even wipe oneself when one owns this $6,000-plus commode, because it actually washes and dries one at the touch of a touchscreen.</span> Just like Trump himself, the Numi can spit out water and blow air at the slightest provocation.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">So the creator of the golden toilet is understandably resigned about Trump's refusal of his generous counter-offer:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i><span class="sIIzFWOzgx" id="wJKCeSfU">Asked why he volunteered “America” to the White House, Cattelan told the Washington Post, “Everything seems absurd until we die and then it makes sense.”</span></i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">It even makes plenty of sense when we're still alive. It makes even more sense when we're clinging to a mere semblance of life by the skin of our teeth.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Oh well. Donald Trump will always have multiple versions of the iconic kitsch called <i>Apocalypse Now On Snowy</i> <i>Evening</i> to keep him company in his empire's multiple throne rooms. He'll always have the smell of Davos in the morning.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ed78TdVfCIY/Wms_HYk1BGI/AAAAAAAAGnQ/ayDU1Qkg3rUUh_9ALCRnPcoZvSBSgjPEQCEwYBhgL/s1600/trump%2Bhelicopters.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="195" data-original-width="260" height="298" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ed78TdVfCIY/Wms_HYk1BGI/AAAAAAAAGnQ/ayDU1Qkg3rUUh_9ALCRnPcoZvSBSgjPEQCEwYBhgL/s400/trump%2Bhelicopters.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZVSs_brzOHM/WmtC9KNXYiI/AAAAAAAAGnY/beXyCff2VgQRC8SdS92UlKaRchj8cW0mgCLcBGAs/s1600/trump%2Bhelicopters.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="617" data-original-width="962" height="256" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZVSs_brzOHM/WmtC9KNXYiI/AAAAAAAAGnY/beXyCff2VgQRC8SdS92UlKaRchj8cW0mgCLcBGAs/s400/trump%2Bhelicopters.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kXQnnYesh2g/WmtDc40C9sI/AAAAAAAAGng/_00mpIeRDBc4ShJslU1FqON7EW-JwoIxQCLcBGAs/s1600/trump%2Bheli%2B3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="641" data-original-width="962" height="266" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kXQnnYesh2g/WmtDc40C9sI/AAAAAAAAGng/_00mpIeRDBc4ShJslU1FqON7EW-JwoIxQCLcBGAs/s400/trump%2Bheli%2B3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"></span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-artifice-of-deal.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-5770912380363558220Wed, 24 Jan 2018 15:57:00 +00002018-01-24T11:46:40.291-05:00ursula k. le guinUrsula K. Le Guin<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The grand dame of imaginative literature <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/obituaries/ursula-k-le-guin-acclaimed-for-her-fantasy-fiction-is-dead-at-88.html?hpw&amp;rref=obituaries&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;module=well-region&amp;region=bottom-well&amp;WT.nav=bottom-well">has died</a>, aged 88.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Acclaimed author of such socialist/anarchist-oriented fantasy masterpieces as <i>The Dispossessed</i> and <i>The Left Hand of Darkness</i>, Ursula Le Guin largely confined herself to poetry, social commentary and yes,<a href="http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Blog-Index.html"> blogging,</a> in her later years. As a matter of fact, I was in the middle of a collection of her often hilarious essays when I got the <i>New</i> <i>York Times</i> alert that she had died at her home in Portland, Oregon after several months of ill health.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span>&nbsp; <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">My favorite essay in the collection ("No Time To Spare") so far is her skewering of an insipid questionnaire she received from Harvard University in 2011, in which aging alumni were asked what they cared about, and what they did in their spare time. And thus the title: when you're in your 80s, your days are rather too limited to worry about filling out stupid surveys which proffer <i>golf, bridge, shopping and racquet sports </i>as the most likely answers to how aging and comfortable Ivy Leaguers spend their free time. Not one of the choices for old-age activities lacked a capitalistic profit motive at its very core.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome," Le Guin quipped. "But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with&nbsp; doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between by upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly an deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time."</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"What is Harvard thinking of?" she scoffed. "I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare." (Le Guin was actually a 1951 graduate of Radcliffe, the "sister school" of the then-all male university.)</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">She was an ardent critic of neoliberal capitalism throughout her life, more than apparent in her body of work. One of the questions on the Harvard survey of octogenarian grads was how they ranked, for "future generations," the importance "of economic stability and growth for the U.S., terrorism, improved healthcare quality and cost, implementation of an effective immigration policy, improved bipartisanship in politics and the export of democracy."</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"Since we're supposed to be considering the life of future generations," Le Guin acerbically reacted, after noting that Harvard falsely equated economic stability and growth, "it seems a strange list, limited to quite immediate concerns and filtered through such current right-wing obsessions as 'terrorism. effective immigration policy and the exportation of democracy' (which I assume is a euphemism for our policy of invading countries we don't like and trying to destroy their society, culture and religion.) Nine choices, but nothing about climate destabilization, nothing about international politics, nothing about population growth, nothing about industrial pollution, nothing about the control of government by corporations, nothing about human rights or injustice or poverty."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">It's no accident that the death of this groundbreaking, award-winning writer, who <a href="http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-leguin-scalzi-20180123-story.html">John Scalzi calls</a> the "spiritual mother of generations of writers," is barely being noticed on mainstream media. The<i> New York Times </i>obituary is now entirely gone from its initial placement below the digital home page fold. At the top of today's page, in fact, is a big spread about a "radical" new reality TV show called "RePaul's Drag Race" which commercializes the politics of personal identity for a mass audience.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Le Guin would probably have been amused, if not enamored, given that she was the literary ground-breaker of gender-bending narrative, with roots solidly planted in the original socialism-aligned feminist movement.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Here she is accepting the 2014 National Book Awards' lifetime achievement honors in decidedly anti-censorship and anti-capitalism ("a panic of ignorance and greed") language.</span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Et9Nf-rsALk/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Et9Nf-rsALk?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"></span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/ursula-k-le-guin.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-1333508689240725295Mon, 22 Jan 2018 16:13:00 +00002018-01-24T11:59:59.615-05:00alliance for securing democracydemocratsneoconsrussiagateNeocon Democrats Already Blaming Russia For Shutdown Mess<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><strike>If</strike> When the Democrats are pressured into striking a deal with the bad guys to keep the government chugging along for awhile longer, they want you to know it was all the Russians' fault. David Leonhardt (see previous post) will be so disappointed when he finds out that that his scolding had little to do with "the big cave."</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The Democratic veal pen now known as <i>HuffPo</i> has collaborated with the new neocon think tank, <a href="http://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/">Alliance for Securing Democracy</a>, to spread the word that the criticism of hapless Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is emanating not just from American constituents, but from Kremlin "bots" using the hashtag <i>#SchumerShutdown</i> on social media.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Despite all the best algorithmic and human censorship efforts of Twitter, Google and Facebook, Russian-trolled anti-Schumer messages are "blowing up" the Internet. You see, The Alliance has devised its own copyrighted "Gizmo" measuring tool to prove it! The attack on Wall Street stooge Schumer is getting so bad it's even surpassed the nefarious <i>#ReleaseTheMemo</i> campaign. The Alliance would have you believe that no actual Americans ever had the intellectual wherewithal to be curious about much of anything before the Russians went on the Internet and infiltrated all their brains. You'd think that the all-American right-wing propaganda mill known as Fox News was just sitting around and twiddling its pudgy little thumbs.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>HuffPo</i> reporter Jennifer Bendery writes:</span></span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="content-list-component bn-content-list-text yr-content-list-text text" data-beacon-parsed="true" data-beacon="{&quot;p&quot;:{&quot;mnid&quot;:&quot;citation&quot;}}" data-rapid-cpos="4" data-rapid-parsed="subsec" data-rapid-subsec="paragraph"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>#SchumerShutdown has surpassed #ReleaseTheMemo as the highest trending hashtag among Russian influence campaigns.&nbsp;They seized on that hashtag&nbsp;<a class="bn-clickable" data-beacon-parsed="true" data-beacon="{&quot;p&quot;:{&quot;lnid&quot;:&quot;earlier this month&quot;,&quot;mpid&quot;:1,&quot;plid&quot;:&quot;https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/right-wing-demand-releasethememo-endorsed-russian-bots-trolls-n839141&quot;}}" data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="2" data-v9y="1" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:4" href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/right-wing-demand-releasethememo-endorsed-russian-bots-trolls-n839141" target="_blank">earlier this month</a>&nbsp;in an effort to pressure Republican lawmakers to release a classified memo written by House GOP aides that allegedly describes abuses in FBI surveillance practices.&nbsp;Conservative organizations like Breitbart and the Daily Caller have given major coverage to the memo, but Democratic lawmakers have denounced it as deeply misleading.</i></span></span></div><div class="content-list-component bn-content-list-text yr-content-list-text text" data-beacon-parsed="true" data-beacon="{&quot;p&quot;:{&quot;mnid&quot;:&quot;citation&quot;}}" data-rapid-cpos="5" data-rapid-parsed="subsec" data-rapid-subsec="paragraph"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Alliance for Securing Democracy tracks activity from <a class="bn-clickable" data-beacon-parsed="true" data-beacon="{&quot;p&quot;:{&quot;lnid&quot;:&quot;600 monitored Twitter accounts&quot;,&quot;mpid&quot;:2,&quot;plid&quot;:&quot;http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/&quot;}}" data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="3" data-v9y="1" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:5" href="http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/" target="_blank">600 monitored Twitter accounts</a> linked to Russian influence operations.&nbsp;It has found that Russian bots and trolls frequently amplify content attacking the United States, conspiracy theories and misinformation.</i></span></span></div></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Coincidentally (of course) Twitter has just <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/twitter-begins-emailing-the-677775-americans-who-took-russian-election-bait/">sent emails </a>to 677,775 users informing them that they were being monitored for the thought-less crime of having read and/or shared tweets from Kremlin propaganda mills.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Also, totally coincidentally, <i>HuffPo</i> has just <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/22/huffpost-we-really-loved-your-contributions-now-fuck-off/">sent its own emails</a> to its entire stable of unpaid freelance contributors informing them that their "content" would no longer be accepted. This&nbsp; includes all content from writers like <a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/04/how-russia-gate-rationalizes-censorship/?print=print">Joe Lauria</a> who dare to express healthy skepticism that RussiaGate has any basis in reality, or that endless war might not be in the best interests of humanity.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span>&nbsp;<i> </i><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>HuffPo</i> editor <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/business/media/huffpost-unpaid-contributors.html">Lydia Polgreen,</a> late of the <i>New York Times, </i>told the <i>New York Times </i>that she's banned the messy, noisy, free-thinking bloggers so as to "declutter" the site and give more room to quality journalism, such as, presumably, the pro-war propaganda provided by neocon think tanks.<i><br /></i></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>HuffPo</i> certainly did not see fit to inform its readers that the Alliance for Securing Democracy (which it approvingly describes as a "bipartisan" outfit led by former national security officials) is top-heavy with discredited extremist Bush-era neocons who thought it was a dandy idea to invade Iraq and destabilize the entire Middle East and beyond to make the world safe for greedy oil companies and bankers and "defense" contractors.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">As a matter of fact, the head honcho of the Alliance is <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/31/AR2009123102821.html">Michael Chertoff</a>, Bush's Homeland Security director. The paranoia-for-profit industry has been very good to him, his private security firm having raked in big bucks from its no-contract Orwellian RapiScan machines used at airports all over the world to humiliate travelers on the pretext of thwarting terrorism. Chertoff has a nice supplemental gig working alongside Obama's former attorney general, Eric Holder, at the Covington and Burling white shoe law firm in Washington, D.C.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Also serving on the Alliance board are neocon columnist Bill Kristol; former acting CIA Director Mike Morell; CNN fear-monger, Harvard professor and former congressman Mike Rogers; Jamie Fly, foreign policy adviser to Marco Rubio; and Clinton campaign operative and Obama administration official Jake Sullivan.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/07/17/with-new-d-c-policy-group-dems-continue-to-rehabilitate-and-unify-with-bush-era-neocons/">Glenn Greenwald </a>called this power hub of Democratic-Neocon propagandists&nbsp; "one of the most consequential but under-discussed changes in the American political landscape."</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">He wrote last summer: </span></span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>The song Democrats are now singing about Russia and Putin is one the neocons wrote many years ago, and all of the accompanying rhetorical tactics — accusing those who seek better relations with Moscow of being Putin’s stooges, unpatriotic, of suspect loyalties, etc. — are the ones that have defined the neocons smear campaigns for decades.</i></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>The union of Democrats and neocons is far more than a temporary marriage of convenience designed to bring down a common enemy. As this new policy group illustrates, the union is grounded in widespread ideological agreement on&nbsp;a broad array of foreign policy debates: from Israel to Syria to the Gulf States to Ukraine to Russia. And the narrow differences that exist between the two groups — on the wisdom of the Iran deal, the nobility of the Iraq War, the justifiability of torture — are more relics of past debates than current, live controversies. These two groups have found common cause because, with rare and limited exception, they share common policy beliefs and foreign policy mentalities.</i></span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">One bright note: from what I can tell, the nationwide women's marches over the weekend were not centered on Russia fear-mongering despite the best co-opting efforts of the Democratic Party. They were not even exclusively centered on "resisting" Trump, but rather on women running for office in the interests of social and economic justice, and people joining together in solidarity across class, race and gender lines.&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">They'd better watch out, or next time the politicians (even the trolling Trump) and police might not be so friendly about the protests which they now find so convenient to encourage. They still seem to have no doubts that the marches are anything more than a get-out-the-vote effort for the establishment party.<br /></span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/neocon-democrats-already-blaming-russia.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-1119304902322906454Mon, 22 Jan 2018 13:24:00 +00002018-01-22T18:38:28.749-05:00appeasementdavid leonhardtgovernment shutdownThat Old Weimar Feeling<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/21/opinion/democrats-should-settle.html">David Leonhardt</a> of the<i> New York Times</i> is at it again.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Barely a few hours into the government shutdown, and he already wants the Democrats to settle with the Republicans for the good of the party:</span></span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>A culture war over immigration replays the racialized debate that dominated the 2016 presidential campaign. As much as it saddens me to say it, the evidence is pretty clear that a racialized debate helps Trump. It’s the kind of debate that will make it harder for Democrats to retake the Senate and House this year....</i></span></span><br /><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="289" data-total-count="4753" id="story-continues-4"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Democratic leaders are certainly right to insist on protection for the Dreamers. The question is whether the best way to protect them, and the best way to elect politicians who will help them in the long term involves keeping immigration policy in the political spotlight for weeks on end.</i></span></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="285" data-total-count="5038"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>The smart move now for Democrats is to accept a short-term funding bill that ends the shutdown and diffuses the tension. Republican leaders are open to that solution, because they have their own vulnerabilities. Their party is the majority party, which is often blamed for dysfunction.</i></span></span></div><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>That solution feels a bit unsatisfying, I know. But tactical retreats can lead to big victories in the future.</i></span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">My published response:</span></span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;Last week this author suggested that Democrats stop the "race-talk" for fear that it would turn off the white voters the Big Tent party needs to win come November. Better to get people worrying about their own economic interests than Trump's racism, as if the two haven't been inextricably linked throughout the history of this "democratic" republic of ours. <br /><br />This week Leonhardt is essentially suggesting that the Dreamers should be deferred lest the Democrats end up taking the blame for the government shutdown. At least they'll have the satisfaction of having pretended to care before doing what they traditionally do best: cave to the Republicans while pleading "we must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good."<br /><br />This is beginning to sound a bit too ominously like 1930s Germany and all that pragmatic appeasement that led to one of the worst exterminations in recorded history.<br /><br />You either have principles, or you don't.<br /><br />The Democrats shouldn't "settle" with fascists. If they do now, they'll do it again... and again... and again. And everybody will lose and more people will die - except, of course, the de facto oligarchy running the place.<br /><br />Do the Democrats want to remembered as quislings and appeasers, or they do they want to be lauded as people who put their principles above winning a few more seats in a deeply corrupted political system?</span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Hannah Arendt wrote that all of the world's major religions have rightly condemned "lesser evil" arguments such as those the influential Leonhardt is espousing in the Paper of Record. Conniving with evil in the hope that some good might come out of it someday is at best cowardly and at worst complicit. The Democratic Party has already veered so far to the right that the latter is probably the more accurate theory, given that in exchange for protections for Dreamers, Democrats had already enthusiastically agreed to a border wall costing billions of dollars and even more draconian crackdowns on border-crossers. DACA itself was always the lesser evil, because it arbitrarily granted amnesty to a select few based upon their (healthy) youth, military service, "working hard," or enrollment in school.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil,"wrote Arendt. " If we look at the techniques of totalitarian government, it is obvious that the argument of 'the lesser evil' -- far from being raised only from the outside by those who do not belong to the ruling elite -- is one of the mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and criminality. Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such."</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"The extermination of Jews," she continued, "was preceded by a very gradual sequence of anti-Jewish measures, each of which was accepted with the argument that refusal to cooperate would make things worse -- until a stage was reached where nothing worse could have possibly happened."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">You know we're in trouble when the existential plight of millions of human beings and basic social justice issues have been demoted, by our leading newspaper, down to a "culture war" over "identity politics" between two bickering factions who just can't seem to get along with each other. Leonhardt and other neoliberal operatives choose to ignore the fact that without racism and human enslavement and oppression, predatory capitalism would not and could not exist</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Paraphrasing Machiavelli, they sow hemlock seed and tell us to expect lush fields of ripening corn.</span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/that-old-weimar-feeling.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-1111778322510205606Thu, 18 Jan 2018 21:14:00 +00002018-01-19T09:26:09.578-05:00internet censorshiptech corporationsus senateCensorship Is As Censorship Does<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The mass media just can't get enough of Donald Trump's ludicrous "fake news" <a href="https://www.gop.com/the-highly-anticipated-2017-fake-news-awards/">awards</a>, posted on Wednesday night only to almost instantaneously crash due to all that eager traffic. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">That, and other important stories like <i>#GirtherGate</i> and Congress's annual contrived government shutdown threat, have apparently filled the news-holes so densely that there was no room to <a href="https://www.rollcall.com/news/policy/senators-threaten-legislation-social-media-firms-content">cover</a> the Wednesday Senate hearing in which groveling reps of the tech giants Google, Facebook and Twitter outlined all the nifty ways they're censoring online content from users they've deemed undesirable or displeasing to the political establishment</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The ostensible purpose of the hearing was "terrorism" and sex trafficking, but then it devolved quickly to generalized <i>Content Moderation</i>, which is postmodern Newspeak for censorship under that silly old First Amendment.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Social media's failure to crack down on what Senator John Thune (R-SD) called "extremist groups (that) recruit and radicalize folks that (sic) will commit violent acts against Americans" could well lead to fines and other punitive measures against the tech giants, he warned. He didn't bother to specify what exactly constitutes "extremist groups."</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span>&nbsp; <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Eager to show how diligently they're cooperating with Congress and the US intelligence "community," Facebook Global Policy Director Monica Bickert bragged that her company now employs 7,500 people whose sole function is to monitor and remove allegedly dicey content. This censoring workforce, which includes alumni of spy agencies and law enforcement, will double by the end of year, she vowed.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Just as the 17-agency federal intelligence Borg is a form of bureaucratic overkill which misses more "terrorist plots" than it uncovers or manufactures, Facebook says it has now "partnered" with more than a dozen other private corporations to devise a permanent blacklist based upon certain digital fingerprints which only they, the patriotic nerds of America, can spot. Suspicion of subversion could therefore get a user banned from the entire Internet, with no hope of appeal or any other form of due process. Suspects shall be presumed guilty before they even know they're suspected of anything.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Google is taking it a step further by actively promoting content from "acceptable" news sources in an Orwellian initiative which it dubs <i>Counter-Speech.</i></span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gFxue9W7KMQ/WmELnU1MhWI/AAAAAAAAGms/63ZLasDnh2ku3plf_NKVfwR_cxRhwk1UQCLcBGAs/s1600/counterspeech.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="165" data-original-width="305" height="216" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gFxue9W7KMQ/WmELnU1MhWI/AAAAAAAAGms/63ZLasDnh2ku3plf_NKVfwR_cxRhwk1UQCLcBGAs/s400/counterspeech.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Clint Watts, a former FBI official who has glided through the revolving door to Censorship, Inc. added to the paranoia at the Wednesday Senate hearing as he described various far-fetched scenarios for the end of the world via the Internet. One of them is "Anwar Awlaki Meets PizzaGate." (Awlaki was the radical Muslim cleric who was droned to death on the extra-judicial orders of Barack Obama, while "PizzaGate" was the alt-right agitprop campaign which linked Hillary Clinton to a pedophile ring run out of a D.C. pizza parlor, and which led to a true believer firing his weapon at the eatery's threatening ceiling.)</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The danger, schmoozed Watts to the senators, is not so much the homegrown white supremacy resurgence, but the possibility that <i>Russians</i> are fooling the "lesser-educated" white American supremacists into wreaking havoc.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;Twitter, for its own patriotic part, is so gung-ho about the assault on the First Amendment that it euphemistically calls its own censorship rep "the director of public policy and <i>philanthropy</i>."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">As reported by <a href="https://gizmodo.com/social-media-giants-assure-senators-they-totally-have-t-1822171784"><i>Gizmodo,</i></a><i> </i></span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>&nbsp;Sen. Brian Schatz, for example, wanted to know if Twitter is taking care of its fake news problem and if we can be sure that it is “going to get this right, and before the midterms.” For the record, Twitter is more prepared this time around than it’s ever been, (Carlos) Monje said. And that’s not surprising because it’s never really had to think about the elections all that much until last year.</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Monje, despite being a nerd and a charity geek, must be one of those thoughtless dudes whom the FBI guy was complaining about. So it's good to know that the US Senate is such a great teacher. Twitter is not yet so patriotically savvy, however, that it has any immediate plans to ban Trump's own Twitter account and the reckless nuclear threats contained therein.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Meanwhile, the same US Senate which purports to be so worried about social media subversion today <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/369544-senate-votes-to-extend-nsa-spying-program">voted</a>, by a grotesque two-to-one margin, to give the dangerous Donald "Fake News" Trump six more years of totally awesome and unfettered power to continue spying on anybody he feels like.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">***</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">In case you missed it, the <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/01/18/repo-j18.html"><i>World Socialist Website</i> </a>hosted a very interesting (and so far uncensored) discussion with Chris Hedges about censorship.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FaERQWrWLO0/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FaERQWrWLO0?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></span></div><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>&nbsp;</i> </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Although I can't prove it (lacking the necessary tools and expertise) I suspect that <i>Sardonicky</i> also has been censored. Google, which actually hosts me on its platform, had already discontinued the <i>Google </i>+</span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp; feature, which effectively boosted search rankings according to the number of times a post was up-voted by readers. That absence did affect my traffic somewhat. But in just the last month, Google analytics informs me, my readership has plummeted by a drastic 60 percent. I assumed at first that people were too busy to drop by during the winter holidays. Then I wondered if it was a glitch on Google's end. Then I wondered if readers had simply grown bored, or had caught the nasty Flu bug, or got outrage-fatigued, or just plain sick of my contrarian "content."&nbsp; But to lose more than half your audience, all in the space of just four short weeks?&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Then I decided not to take it seriously. Life is far too short to fret about blog traffic instead of worrying about the ongoing threat to pretty much the whole Bill of Rights.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">***</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">P.S., 1/19: I was alerted by "Clueless It Seems" in comments under my previous post that the commenting section of this post was gone. Sure enough, the cartoon I'd appended of Natasha the Spy had obliterated the commenting button. That'll teach me not to make graphic Russian jokes if I want to continue enjoying the privilege of using the Google blogging platform!</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">In case you're wondering why I don't just migrate to WordPress, I checked into it a long time ago. Because it would not allow me to transfer any of the art accompanying my posts, I decided against the move. Also, creating my own unique website would cost me money I don't have. So I'll continue muddling through at this free (at least in the monetary sense) venue for as long as I am able. Since I don't allow ads on this site, any cash they're making off me is probably minimal to none. </span><br />http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/censorship-is-as-censorship-does.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-2315571721765418337Tue, 16 Jan 2018 15:36:00 +00002018-01-17T14:36:04.989-05:00democratsracismtrumpGray Lady Wants You To Cool the "Race-talk" <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">How can you tell when the ruling elites have sunk into a moral cesspit? When the Paper of Record, acting on behalf of the Democratic Party, warns liberal politicians and pundits not to talk about Donald Trump's or anybody else's racism past a certain, self-serving point.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">You see, it's not about doing or saying what's right. It's about doing or saying whatever it takes for your political party to win.&nbsp; Calling out the evil of racism apparently has a sell-by date, especially in a campaign year.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Of course, the <i>New York Times</i> posits it a bit more delicately than that, as it coyly headlines David Leonhardt's column <i>Is All This Talk of Racism Bad for Democrats?</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The short answer is "Yes, You Idiot!"<i>, </i>but since this is liberalism talking, there are the usual "pragmatic" excuses for ignoring both the historical and contemporary racism in this country. It's all about clawing back power by any means necessary. You see, although the Democrats thought they they could win in 2016 by harping about the Trumpian sexism targeting Hillary Clinton, similar talk of Trumpian racism should be off-limits as we approach the 2018 midterms. Identity politics is largely a matter of the <i>class</i> and <i>status </i>of the identity symbol they're talking about and elevating on any given day.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">(As just one recent example of this basic truth, the recently-announced Senate candidacy of transgender whistleblower <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/01/15/centrist-dems-launch-smear-campaign-against-young-trans-woman-all-to-keep-an-old-straight-white-man-in-power/">Chelsea Manning</a> has elicited howls of outrage from corporate Democrats. She is simply not the "right" kind of identity politics symbol for them, because she exposed their war crimes and otherwise embarrassed the ruling elites when she furnished their self-serving correspondence to Wikileaks.)</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">For his own pragmatic part, meanwhile, Donald Trump certainly wants 2018 to be all about race, the better to whip up the estimated third of the electorate which still supports him. He needs them to continue believing that even the lowest white man is superior to the highest black man, That was, and is, a winning strategy for him. He <i>wants</i> Democrats to continue accusing him of racism.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Therefore, it follows that the Democrats should fight this strategy by ignoring racism itself.&nbsp; After all, this is the reality-based community, in which facts have a well-known liberal bias.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Of course, racism really sucks, <i>"but"</i> as David Leonhardt worries: </span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>&nbsp;It's&nbsp; also important to distinguish between the current moment and the remainder of 2018. Calling out Trump as a racist is the right thing to do in the days immediately following comments like his vulgar denigration of Haitians and others last week. It should not become the centerpiece of the Democrats’ 2018 strategy. </i></span><br /><br /><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="314" data-total-count="1832" id="story-continues-3"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>That centerpiece needs to be a principled populism that causes voters — white, black, Latino and Asian — to <b>think about </b>their economic interests. Trump certainly can be a huge part of the strategy. The president is almost always the central issue in a midterm election. The key is how Democrats talk about him.</i></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="314" data-total-count="1832" id="story-continues-3"><br /></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="208" data-total-count="2040"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Emphasizing the ways he’s hurting the middle class and working class has almost no downside. It turns off no substantial group of voters. It can win over swing voters and motivate reliably progressive ones.</i></span></div></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Well, at least he had the decency to wait till after the Martin Luther King holiday to publish his cautionary screed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">You might agree with Leonhardt - after all, he sounds reasonable and caring and even class-conscious - but read the subtext. He is not suggesting that the Democratic Party actually push policies that will make people's lives better. He is simply suggesting that the candidates talk a good game and get the voters to just "think about" about their economic interests - by making the mid-term campaigns All About Trump. His tax plan and other assaults on everyday Americans are so horrible, who needs an actual plan of one's own? All that Democrats need are better bullshitting skills as they carefully ignore the "shit hole" rhetoric they are currently in a frenzy of co-opting to death.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">In other words, rather than open up the whole can of worms about the American imperialistic origins of "shit hole countries," the Democrats want to dial it back to the same old "We Suck Less" strategy. As Leonhardt enthuses, ignoring Trump's race-baiting in favor of his economic assaults <i>"turns off no substantial group of voters.<b> It can win </b>over swing voters <b>and motivate</b> reliably progressive ones."&nbsp;</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">In other words, those wily Democrats think they can seduce white people into the voting booth by making them worry more about money than they worry about black people, who shall not be mentioned in certain polite bourgeois company. Pander, rinse, repeat, ignore, pander some more. And besides ignoring racism, Dems must studiously avoid all mention of the class war and the politically-manufactured wealth inequality, now at its most extreme level since the last Gilded Age.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Another inside-baseball <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/369021-dems-search-for-winning-playbook">piece </a>by <i>The Hill's </i>Amie Parnes puts it even more bluntly. The Democrats once again plan to follow the winning 2006 Rahm Emanuel strategy by going after the white suburban voters who propelled Trump to his slim victory one year ago. They will also continue harping on their own witch-hunting, xenophobic agenda of<i> Russia, Russia, Russia</i>:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Emanuel benefited&nbsp;from the political&nbsp;climate of 2006.&nbsp; </span></i></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>The election was driven by opposition to an unpopular President George W. Bush, who was drowning in headlines about the Iraq war and his handling of Hurricane Katrina. Congressional Republicans—including former House Majority Leader Tom Delay (D-Texas) and Rep. Mark Foley (D-Fla.), were also rocked by scandal in the months leading up to the election. &nbsp;</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Democrats say the political climate is even more poisonous for Republicans now. For one thing, Trump’s White House is shrouded in the Russia investigation. And Republican incumbents “are dropping like flies,” in the words of one Democratic strategist helping to win back the House.&nbsp;</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>“They’re imploding,” the Democrat said. “All we need to do is let them unravel while holding firm to our issues.” </i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;Squelching talk of race and racism under the centrist Democratic bromide "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" also lets them ignore their own right-wing policies of endless war, bombings of dark-skinned people in foreign lands under Obama, deportations of record numbers of dark-skinned people under Obama, the warrantless surveillance of American citizens approved by Obama, the bailouts of Wall Street and corporations at the expense of Main Street under Obama, the privatization of public education and the closings of schools in minority neighborhoods under Obama, as well as the militarized police brutality against black and brown people in these same poor neighborhoods.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The upshot of the Democrats' argument is this: let poor people continue to be victimized under our more beneficent watch while we continue to court our wealthy donors and co-opt the support of the people who must continue to believe they "have nowhere else to go."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Remember, this is not about you and your hard lives. This is all about a preferred slate of oligarchic lackeys gaining back power by pretending to care about you for one magical moment every two, four, or six years.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">If they think telling people to shut up about uncomfortable topics is a winning strategy for them as they attempt to control the "narrative," maybe they should rethink their entire careers.</span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/gray-lady-wants-you-to-cool-race-talk.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-4910062370810911113Fri, 12 Jan 2018 17:24:00 +00002018-01-12T14:01:47.851-05:00political ponerologyspellbinderstrumpTrump the Spellbinder<br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jUZlEa0w7w4/WljrInf-OuI/AAAAAAAAGmA/1mAfSZpwfdEZ7TbaF_dWK8l7qZPdMPutwCLcBGAs/s1600/dali%2Bspellbound.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="157" data-original-width="320" height="196" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jUZlEa0w7w4/WljrInf-OuI/AAAAAAAAGmA/1mAfSZpwfdEZ7TbaF_dWK8l7qZPdMPutwCLcBGAs/s400/dali%2Bspellbound.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The Salvador Dali Painting in Hitchcock's <i>Spellbound</i></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;Minority Whip Dick Durbin's head must have been spinning to the point of whiplash from all that awesome proximity to power in the Oval Office. Because when Donald Trump repeatedly described Haiti and African countries as "shitholes," the senior senator from Illinois apparently did not confront him. He was rendered as mute as a Democrat can be when negotiating how many expulsions of black and brown people might be acceptable without opening up the United States to charges of overt racism and xenophobia.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Just as Trump was ironically issuing a proclamation honoring Martin Luther King Jr. on his upcoming birthday, he found himself in the awkward position of insisting that although his language may have been "tough" during immigration talks, he certainly Did. Not. Have. Verbal. Relations. With. That. Word. Period.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Meanwhile, it's finally become acceptable to call Trump a racist as well as a senile ignoramus. It's even become acceptable to print and say the word "shithole" and for the media to pretend to agonize over all the deep soul-searching involved in finally deciding to print and say the word "shithole," despite the fact that newsrooms all over the country are notorious hotbeds of unabashed profanity.</span><br /><br /><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="146" data-total-count="1756"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"It is exceedingly rare,"<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/business/media/trump-vulgarity.html?hp&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=b-lede-package-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news"> writes</a> the <i>New York Times's</i> Michael A. Grynbaum, "for the country’s biggest news organizations to publish a quote that includes an expletive; usually, they employ a censored or blanked-out version. On Thursday’s network evening newscasts, NBC News was the only organization that quoted Mr. Trump in full. Anchors at ABC and CBS used the word “blank” instead. But several media executives said on Thursday that the news value of Mr. Trump’s remarks, which the White House did not dispute, was undeniable."</span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="146" data-total-count="1756"><br /></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="146" data-total-count="1756"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Donald Trump is not only the Gaslighter-in-Chief. He is also the Spellbinder-in-Chief, and his audience is behaving like the typical Ingrid Bergman damsel in distress. Just witness the supposedly powerful Dick Durbin's helpless shock and awe in the face of it.</span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="146" data-total-count="1756"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="146" data-total-count="1756"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Andrew Lobaczewski, the late clinical psychologist and author of <a href="http://www.ponerology.com/"><i>Political Ponerology</i></a>, the study of contagious societal evil, described the&nbsp; paralyzing effect that the spellbinding Trumps of the world can have on the people around them:&nbsp; </span></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">'Persons with an innate talent for intuiting psychological situations tend to take advantage of this gift in an egotistical and ruthless fashion. In the thought process of such people, a short cut way develops which bypasses the handicapped (brain) function, thus leading from associations directly to words, deeds, and decisions which are not subject to any dissuasion. Such individuals interpret their talent for intuiting situations and making split-second oversimplified decisions a sign of their superiority compared to normal people, who need to think for a long time, experiencing self-doubt and conflicting motivations.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"Such characters traumatize and actively<i> spellbind</i> others, and their influence finds it exceptionally easy to bypass the controls of common sense. A large proportion of people tend to credit such individuals with special powers, thereby succumbing to their egotistic beliefs. If a parent manifests such a defect, no matter how minimal, all the children in the family evidence anomalies in personality development.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"Subordinating a normal person to psychologically abnormal individuals has severe and deforming effects on his or her personality: it engenders trauma and neurosis. This is accomplished in a manner which generally evades conscious controls. Such a situation deprives a person of his natural rights: to practice his own mental hygiene, develop a sufficiently autonomous personality, and utilize his common sense. In the light of natural law, it thus constitutes a kind of crime - which can appear at any social scale, in any context - although it is not mentioned in any code of law."</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">In a healthy society, Lobaczewski wrote, the activities of spellbinders can usually be stifled fairly quickly. But in an unhealthy society, riven by extreme wealth and social inequalities, the spellbinder finds that people are amenable to his influence. And all that "normal" people like Dick Durbin can do in response is to moralize and express disgust, rather than do anything concrete to stop the madness. That would necessarily include acknowledging the evil of their own policies, which gave rise to Trump in the first place.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">There are many psychopaths behind the scenes who steer and/or enable Trump even as they pretend to condemn his words. Even the "good" Democrats seem&nbsp; increasingly exhausted by the futile effort of telling the president he ought to behave himself so that the quiet work of the oligarchy can proceed apace, and they can pretend that droning people to death in foreign countries and sending thousands of American troops to Africa is not also a form of hideous racism.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Trump's deviant personality is no more deviant than American hegemony itself. He is simply the exception to the unwritten rule that it's the skillfully discreet psychopaths who, after careful corporate vetting, win high office because, as Lobaczewski wrote, "they have thought-processes more similar to the world of normal people; in general, they are sufficiently connected to the pathological system to provide a guarantee of loyalty."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Since Trump threatens the ruling elites by oafishly ripping the mask right off of them, the only weapons they have left in their arsenal are hapless outrage and helpless moralizing. There's no putting the mask of democracy and freedom and equality back on the face of Ruling Class America once it's been exposed in all its ugliness. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">So we ordinary people have to protect ourselves both from Trump and from the equally dangerous, reactionary, self-righteous and ineffectual ruling class reactions to Trump. Our own psychological health as individuals and as members of society depends upon it.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">We should be neither the helpless Ingrid Bergman wife in <i>Gaslight</i> nor the hapless Ingrid Bergman therapist in <i>Spellbound. </i>We can't play the part of analysts and critics only to succumb and let our emotions of fear and disgust rise above our intellects. We can't be good citizens if we criticize the villainous Trump one minute, and then besottedly fall for the next slick political marketing campaign and neoliberal savior the next.</span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4Dt3ND-l0c8/WlkEryn7rDI/AAAAAAAAGmQ/0RY79U3HbmwJ1Xwh8eR2klY8Gw-z2-71ACLcBGAs/s1600/spellbound%2Bmovie%2Bposter.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="268" data-original-width="182" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4Dt3ND-l0c8/WlkEryn7rDI/AAAAAAAAGmQ/0RY79U3HbmwJ1Xwh8eR2klY8Gw-z2-71ACLcBGAs/s640/spellbound%2Bmovie%2Bposter.jpg" width="434" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Howard Zinn was right: "The really critical thing isn't who's sitting in he White House, but who is sitting in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating? Those are the things that determine what happens."</span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/trump-spellbinder.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-3070422500224355709Thu, 11 Jan 2018 15:41:00 +00002018-01-11T12:03:44.553-05:00black dressesgolden globespussyhatsstate of the uniontrumpThe Island of Misfit Fashionistas<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Barely one year after it first hit the red carpets at fashion shows and in the Trump Tower section of Fifth Avenue and at the D.C. Women's March, the pussy hat has already gone the way of the poodle skirt. Where it's not gathering dust in the back of a closet, it's being showcased in museums as a quaint little curio of a bygone age.</span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jYXcKYT0Gjk/WleBYEIOJWI/AAAAAAAAGlw/ZqLJOzB9pTQTFV0LGxrHv98ZHjqgwdyIACLcBGAs/s1600/pussy%2Bhat.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="351" data-original-width="624" height="223" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jYXcKYT0Gjk/WleBYEIOJWI/AAAAAAAAGlw/ZqLJOzB9pTQTFV0LGxrHv98ZHjqgwdyIACLcBGAs/s400/pussy%2Bhat.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The Victoria and Albert Museum in London <a href="https://news.artnet.com/art-world/victoria-and-albert-museum-pussy-hat-884771">managed to snag one</a> as early as last spring. Still, the pussy hat craze continued on to International Woman's Day in May, with a mass knit-a-thon during a session of the Swiss Parliament. No word as to whether Clinton fans who were so outraged by Vanity Fair's recent suggestion that Hillary take up knitting boycotted those kinds of sewing circle events in solidarity with their heroine.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Not to be outdone by Victoria and Albert, the founder of the original <i>Pussyhat Project</i> plans an actual stand-alone<a href="http://www.tmz.com/2017/01/23/pussyhat-womens-march-washington-museum/"> museum of pussy hats</a> from all over the world. Hollywood stars like Madonna and Julianne Moore were said to be donating their own castaway hats to the permanent exhibit, to be located on the grounds of Michigan State University.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">That the pussy hat craze was relatively short-lived is quite understandable, given that the mass outpourings of anger over Donald Trump's election constituted not so much a social justice protest movement as a coordinated venting of support for the vanquished Hillary Clinton. In fact, the pink pussy hat turned out to be the precursor of the more "woke" and expensive black protest-dress debuting of the Golden Globes.&nbsp; The Great Pussy Hat Rebellion of 2017 has morphed seamlessly into the #MeToo craze, which itself is a proxy fight against Donald Trump in the persona of Harvey Weinstein and other celebrity predators.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Since there is really not that much cultural distance between the spectacle of Hollywood and the spectacle of Washington, the black dress protest movement still has a little life left in it. It's currently gliding high above dystopian Trump Country to make its soft and silky landing at the upcoming State of the Union extravaganza. In just a few short weeks, Democratic congresswomen will make their own bold prime-time fashion statements in solidarity with their fellow actresses.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/house/368427-democrats-planning-protests-for-trumps-first-state-of-the-union"><br /></a></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/house/368427-democrats-planning-protests-for-trumps-first-state-of-the-union"><i>The Hill</i> reports</a>: </span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Female Democrats including House Minority Leader <span class="rollover-people" data-behavior="rolloverpeople"><a class="rollover-people-link" data-nid="187954" href="http://thehill.com/people/nancy-pelosi">Nancy Pelosi</a></span> (D-Calif.) plan to wear black to show solidarity with victims of sexual misconduct, just as Hollywood stars did at an awards show over the weekend.</i></span><br /><div class="dfp-tag-wrapper wrapper" id="dfp-ad-mosad_1-wrapper"><div class="dfp-tag-wrapper" id="dfp-ad-mosad_1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i></i></span></div></div><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Members of the Democratic Women’s Working Group had been discussing ideas for a coordinated effort around the State of the Union after wearing white — the color of suffragettes — to Trump’s first joint address to Congress last year. They settled on wearing black after watching the Golden Globes on Sunday.</i></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Female Democrats are hoping that their display of black will help bring the “Me Too” conversation about rooting out sexual misconduct and women’s issues to Trump’s State of the Union on Jan. 30.</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">After failing to ram through equal pay/living wage legislation during their Obama-era supermajority<i>, </i>the best that the women legislators can now hope for is to "continue the conversation" about how unfair it all is while they show "solidarity" with their fellow millionaire-victims on the Other Coast.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">This is not to say that the Democratic men won't also be making their own statements.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, for one, delivered a rousing House speech to boldly announce that he will bravely plunk himself down right in the middle of the chamber this year instead of doing what he usually does: arriving early to get in prime position to shake the president's hand in front of the TV cameras. His act of passive resistance is sure to light a fire under his constituents, many of whom are finding it increasingly hard to meet the rent and the heating bills in their gentrifying city neighborhoods.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">A few of Engel's colleagues will be even bolder, and not show up at all.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">None of them apparently plans to loudly disrupt the somber ceremony or to heckle Donald Trump. Small-d democratic acts of dissent would not be in keeping with the solemn decorum of the occasion at all. If the Democrats acted up they'd be going as low as that racist Republican who screeched out "You Lie!" to Barack Obama at one of his SOTU addresses. And as the Dems always say, they like to go high and stay high in order to distance themselves from the low and the impolitic. It's why they forced Al Franken out of the Senate: to send a tacit message to whatever tiny sliver of the electorate they're still trying to impress.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Meanwhile, the edgy crusading <i>New York Times </i>wants to hear from all the regular disgruntled women out there.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">They want to know <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/11/opinion/formacist-pussyhats.html?src=twr">just one thing</a>: What did you do with your pink pussy hat? Did you relegate it to the island of misfit clothes or toys? &nbsp;</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"Show us where it lives!" they gush. They want all the fluffy details, and they especially want cute photos, such as your adorable pet cat wearing it to keep its own little ears warm during this harsh winter of gossip and discontent.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">If you're very lucky, a <i>Times</i> editor might even give you a personal call before the nostalgia phase of the pink hat craze reaches its sell-by date.</span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-island-of-misfit-fashionistas.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-3509958024426264549Wed, 10 Jan 2018 15:25:00 +00002018-01-11T12:04:28.448-05:00mediamental healthtrumpThe Cult of Diminished Mental Capacity<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">It seems like it was only yesterday when your refusal to pledge allegiance to the cult of Russophobia got you branded as, if not downright unpatriotic, then at least the naive tool of Vladimir Putin<i>.</i></span></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Now that year-long investigations have turned up zero evidence that Russia "hacked" the 2016 presidential elections or that Donald Trump "colluded" with Putin rather than maybe just launder money with the help of the Russian oligarchy, the newest cult revolves around the 25th amendment and the juicy revelations contained in the hastily written and hastily released <i>Fire and Fury</i>.</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">If you express any doubt that Donald Trump is in the early-to-middle stages of Alzheimer's disease or another form of progressive dementia, then you are a naive fool who refuses to honor the long-distance diagnoses of mental health professionals who possess some sort of remote control PET scanner that sees directly into Trump's Swiss Cheese of a brain.&nbsp;</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Before the new cult of Oprah Winfrey came along the other day to take a little of the psychiatric heat off Trump, his melting brain and deteriorating personality were all that the pundits of CNN and MSNBC could talk about since the book came out last week. Finally, the "open secret" of the president's worsening dementia could be talked about in polite company!&nbsp; And not just talked about, but weaponized. Knowing full well that Trump watches a lot of TV, they embarked on nothing less than a round-the-clock propaganda campaign to not only convince the public of his incapacity, but to convince Trump himself. He must have felt like Ingrid Bergman to dozens of cable news Charles Boyers. Don't ever dare to defend your sanity, my dear, because it only proves how insane you are.&nbsp;</span></span></span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0ToLfQU2xmg/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0ToLfQU2xmg?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></span></div><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br />"Trump's 'Very Stable Genius' Tweet Proves He Isn't" is <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/06/politics/trump-genius-tweet-analysis/index.html">the expert opinion</a> of CNN's Chris "Sigmund" Cilizza, with Meta-Narrative Disability as his differential diagnosis:</span></span></span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="zn-body__paragraph"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Trump's lack of strategy is, in an odd sort of way, the most consistent thing about him. Any look at his life tells you that he is someone who just, well, does stuff.</i></span></span></span></div><div class="zn-body__paragraph"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Why has it taken the political world so long to wake up to that fact? Because we tend to view presidents -- and presidencies -- as tied together by some sort of narrative arc. That each statement, each policy decision, each tweet is somehow in support of a broader agenda. That the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That theirs is a story being told to us by the White House -- and it's our job to sniff it out.</i></span></span></span></div><div class="zn-body__paragraph"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Trump's presidency is abnormal in all sorts of ways. But perhaps the most important to understand is that it lacks any sort of meta-narrative. There are just his reactions to things. That's it.</i></span></span></span></div><div class="zn-body__paragraph"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>And that, whether you like Trump or hate him, is not the hallmark of a three-dimensional chess-playing super genius.</i></span></span></span></div></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">This is quite a different tune than the one <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/opinions/donald-trump-is-gaslighting-america-ghitis/index.html">CNN was playing last year</a> at this time. Back before he became so incapacitated, Trump apparently was a master gaslighter in his own right. He was making reality itself become hazy for a whole nation full of Ingrid Bergmans. But of course, it was really <i>Putin</i> who was pulling the gaslighting strings of his Trump puppet: </span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="zn-body__paragraph"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Russia even tried to gaslight US voters, as intelligence agencies <a href="http://www.edition.cnn.com/2017/01/07/politics/intelligence-report-russian-interference/">concluded, trying to undermine their faith in the democratic process.</a> And when Moscow thought Trump would lose, it planned to promote the view that the election was stolen, under the #DemocracyRIP banner, a plan whose seeds Trump had already planted.</i></span></div><div class="zn-body__paragraph"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>The challenge will be a steep one for journalists and for all Americans, when so much of what comes from the next president has to be checked and double-checked. The first step is to establish when there is a gaslighting operation in progress. </i></span></div></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"></span></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">T</span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">he media's counter-gaslighting strategy has had an effect all right, but probably not what the pundits had in mind. Instead of reduction, via media torture, to even more of a quivering mess of an old man eating cheeseburgers in his locked bedroom while tweeting increasingly maniacal threats and complaints, the president strategized and decided to go on a full-on mental health campaign of his own. Since, like probably every president before him he is a textbook narcissist, he selfishly made the mental health all about <i>him</i>. He started to ever so carefully over-enunciate his words in public appearances. On Tuesday, he opened to TV cameras what would normally have been a private negotiating <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration/trump-promises-to-take-the-heat-for-broad-immigration-deal-idUSKBN1EY149">session on immigration reform</a>. Not only did his mouth form complete sentences, not once did it hang open or even so much as dribble. Trump performed without incident for over an hour. He even uncharacteristally offered to "take the heat" from critics of his pro-DACA concessions rather than lash out as expected.&nbsp; He simply was his usual un-meta self, with the Queens accent which makes the fluent media-political complex cringe so self-righteously.</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">What's more, the Democratic bigwigs in the room actually groveled and laughed and joked and preened and expressed great enthusiasm about working with this supposedly deranged man about his cruel plan to build a wall against immigrants. Once they got their seat at the lime-lit table, they couldn't help themselves.</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;"</span>Democrats are for security at the border,” Democratic House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer assured Trump during the meeting. “There are obviously differences, however, Mr. President, on how you affect that.”&nbsp;</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Richard Durbin, the Senate minority whip, likewise couldn't contain himself at the utter fascistic sanity of it all, gushing to Trump: "We’re all honored to be part of this conversation.There are elements you’re going to find Democrats support when it comes to border security. We want a safe border in America, period, both when it comes to the issues of illegal migration, but also when it comes to drugs and all these other areas.”</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">He later schmoozed to the TV cameras that "my head was spinning" over the 90-minute jam session with Trump. Political dementia is, like, so contagious.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">As even the <i>New York Times</i> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/us/politics/trump-daca-immigration.html">approvingly wrote</a>, the collaborative aura and appearance of civility "were a remarkable break with the divisive messaging that propelled Mr. Trump to the White House and the harsh policies that have defined his first year in office, marked by efforts to demonize and deport immigrants who have entered the country illegally."</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">I guess you just can't gaslight a gaslighter after all. </span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">It's preferable to the ruling class that cruel policies such as the mass expulsions of human beings be done as quietly and secretly as possible, as was the case under the Obama administration. Despite all his xenophobic rhetoric, Trump is not anywhere close to beating the discreet and intelligent Obama, <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/08/trump-deportations-behind-obama-levels-241420">who deported more people </a>during his tenure than any other president.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">***</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">I usually profoundly disagree with everything that conservative <i>New York Times</i> pundit Ross Douthat writes. But as he insightfully opined in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/sunday/trumps-petticoat-government.html">his Sunday column </a>(days before the Democrats engaged with Trump in that bipartisan matter so beloved of the establishment press):&nbsp; </span></span></span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="625" data-total-count="2879"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>But op-ed provocations notwithstanding, the 25th Amendment option isn’t happening — not without some major presidential deterioration in the midst of a major crisis, and probably not even then. And while I blame Republicans for a thousand things that brought us to this pass, it’s too extreme to blame them for not pursuing an option that’s never been tried before, against a president who was recently and (yes) legitimately elected, especially when that option requires extraordinary coordination across the legislative and executive branches and could easily fail … with God-only-knows what kind of consequences.</i></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i> So unless Robert Mueller has more goods than I expect, we are going to live for the next few years in the way that America lived during the waning days of Nixon, the end of the Wilson administration, and perhaps at other moments known only to presidential inner circles — with our own equivalent of the petticoat government, which in this case includes military uniforms, dress suits and whatever outfits Ivanka and Kellyanne Conway favor (but not, any longer, the <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2017/09/why-steve-bannon-wears-so-many-shirts.html">layering of collared shirts</a> perfected by Steve Bannon).</i></span></span></span></div><div class="supplemental-items" data-no-ads="true" data-no-med-rec="true" data-supplemental-order="1"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><br /><br /><br /><aside class="marginalia comments-marginalia selected-comment-marginalia" data-marginalia-type="sprinkled" data-skip-to-para-id=""></aside></div></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">My published response:</span></span></span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The more the media rails about Trump's mental status, the more the third of the electorate which supports him will feel the vicarious paranoia and outrage against the "elites" who, they feel with some justification, are trying to gaslight him out of office sooner rather than later.<br /><br />There's cunning method to Trump's madness. After all, it does take a special kind of malevolent brain to be able to con and market your way into the ranks of the Forbes 400. The real scandal is not that he "colluded" with Russia to deny Hillary her coronation, it's that his corrupt way of doing business over the decades has been so rewarded by the very Establishment now seeking his ouster.<br /><br />As long as the stock market keeps booming and the rich keep growing richer, the #Resistance will continue playing out as a soap opera for our aghast entertainment. Were it not for the fact that Congress has done zilch to take away Trump's capacity to blow us all to smithereens at any time, this whole show would be a work of, like, great comic genius.<br /><br />The media had their chance to destroy Trump's candidacy. Instead they nourished it with $5 billion worth of free advertising. His TV rallies and debates were ratings bonanzas. Media mogul Les Moonves even gloated that Trump "may not be good for America, but he's damned good for CBS!"<br /><br />Meanwhile the "demented" Trump is completing plans to destroy Medicaid and snatch health care away from millions of poor people. Where's the media shock and outrage over that? </span></span></span></blockquote>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-cult-of-diminished-mental-capacity.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-3145572831030980848Sun, 07 Jan 2018 16:28:00 +00002018-01-08T14:56:24.223-05:00golden globesny times gender desk#MeMeMeMeToo Hits the Red Carpet<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><b>&nbsp;* 1/8 Updated Below</b></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">I must have been asleep at the switch, because until last night I hadn't even noticed that the <i>New York Times </i>now<i> </i>has an actual Gender Desk. It must be the replacement for the defunct and less click-worthy Environment Desk that they got rid of a couple of years ago.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;No possible way would they dub it the "Woman's Page" of newspapers of yore, seeing as how that section was rightly derided as sexist for the plethora of recipes, fashions, mothering tips and how-to-please-your-hubby guilt trips. So now it's morphed to the anodyne and politically correct "Gender" moniker.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">As far as the alternately melting and freezing Earth is concerned, who needs coverage of corporate pollution and climate change when our jaded hearts can be warmed by millionaire actresses vying for Best Dressed in Black honors at Sunday night's Golden Globe awards? Some of them are even bringing along honest-to-goddess politicians and activists. It's sort of a reversal of the pre-Trumpian White House Correspondents Dinners, when Hollywood stars came to the Potomac to see and be seen as guests of the corporate media.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The <i>Times</i> is sending its own large team of A-List reporters to provide blow-by-blow coverage of the Hollywood event, which it bills as a veritable Town Hall forum for political activists rather than the booze-soaked second-rate advertisement for the big budget film industry it's always been. It's even sending the award-winning photographer who won a Pulitzer for his glam shots of Barack Obama - the star president who not only collected bundles of cash from Harvey Weinstein, but who made performance art a major part of his own governing strategy.&nbsp; Since everybody who's anybody will be wearing funereal black to send a stern message of solidarity to Harvey Weinstein as they slosh their drinks, it remains to be seen whether the pics themselves will be rendered in serious black and white in order to mirror the grave glitter of it all.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Times</i> star reporter Glenn Thrush, who was just quietly<a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/20/thrush-will-return-to-new-york-times-308966"> welcomed back</a> to the newspaper after his suspension for drunkenly hitting on and badmouthing young female journalists at his previous job, is apparently not going along on the Hollywood junket. His presence would be an insult to the women reporters who are thoroughly disgusted that their newspaper's scolding of predators does not apply to the in-house predators who rake in so much revenue from their edgy, insidery Trumpworld reporting.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Regarding the <i>Times's</i></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"> edgy new series/newsletter called <i>The</i>#<i>MeToo Moment </i>(as opposed to Movement), reporter Bonnie Wertheim <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/us/the-metoo-moment-covering-the-new-red-carpet.html">explains </a>that they'll be "switching things this year" and putting the emphasis not so much on "who" the actresses are wearing but on "what" their choice of outfit signifies for them, their careers, and "the future of the industry." In other words, Hollywood will be given a much-needed boost of gravitas by the Gray Lady. Clothing is not only a fashion statement, it's weaponized speech! Who knew? So entertainment journalists are now officially on notice to <i>#AskHerMore.</i> </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">I can hardly wait for all the self-righteous anti-Trump Alzheimers jokes, the annoying Tom Steyer impeachment ads explaining that an apple is not a banana, the pharmaceutical ads for E.D. and opioid-induced constipation, the anti-aging cosmetics ads, the movie tie-in ads, and of course the numerous political campaign trial balloons sure to be launched this evening.&nbsp;</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><b>*Update&nbsp;</b></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">I was wrong about a couple of things.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">First, only one political trial balloon was launched, and that was from Oprah Winfrey. If her rousing speech on human rights wasn't her debut as a 2020 presidential candidate, I don't know why she even bothered. Donald Trump's empire was and is no impediment to his stint in "public service," so why should Oprah's be?&nbsp; It's truly a #MeToo moment for billionaires to become more directly involved in politics, rather than just peddling their influence and donating their money. Tom Steyer (whose impeachment ad thankfully did <i>not</i> run during the Golden Globes) is also said to be mulling a run, as is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Ditto for Tom Hanks, who sadly didn't get to give his own rousing speech last night because he didn't win for pretending to be Ben Bradlee. I'd be very surprised if the DNC bigwigs were not actively courting Oprah at this very moment. Because if anyone can pull off a victory based solely upon star power and populist oratory and identity politics, she certainly can. It's just too bad that she delivered her speech while receiving the Cecil B DeMille award, named after the notoriously predatory Hollywood director.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">And about those ads. No, Viagra and opioid constipation didn't make the cut, because the sponsors of the #MeToo-centric spectacle were all about selling social responsibility in keeping with the narrowly prescribed theme. The <i>New York Times</i> ran an ad consisting of a page of scrolling print of "He Said, She Said, He Said, She Said, He Said, She Said, She Said, She Said, She Said..." It would have been more effective if Glenn Thrush wasn't the elephant in their newsroom. Mention of due process might have been nice too. Oprah herself added to the righteous flavor when she (perhaps) mistakenly called for more "persecutions" - rather than prosecutions - of offenders.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ss6qQM054B0/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ss6qQM054B0?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Facebook ran an Orwellian ad about changing society for the better. L'Oreal continued telling women that we should buy expensive cosmetics from them because we're "worth it." Mass Mutual pretended to be a church with a choir instead of an insurance sales pitch. Discovery appeared in several slots to tell people to be good citizen-consumers and buy more stuff on credit. Why not, since a new Deutsche Bank study shows that the number of American families with more debt than savings is now at its highest point since 1962?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Not once did anybody mention Trump, who already was the butt of all the jokes at the Academy Awards. The social purpose of the evening was as highly scripted and restricted as the Morticia Addams couture. It was all about the #MeToo moment in the approved narrative moment in time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">And is it only me, or does that new hashtag <i>#TimesUp</i> also double as a plug for the <i>New York Times?</i> I smell a Pulitzer ad campaign to go along with Oprah's presidential ad campaign.</span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/memememetoo-hits-red-carpet.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-6322396166275277632Fri, 05 Jan 2018 19:32:00 +00002018-01-07T13:21:35.713-05:00kentuckymedicaid cutstrumpBomb Cyclone For Healthcare<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">It's January, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/us/winter-snow-bomb-cyclone.html?_r=0">it's cold and snowy</a> outside, and therefore, the media tells us, the end of the world is nigh. Iguanas are literally falling out of trees! Wind chills are expected to plunge below zero for the next two whole days!</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">It's January, and Donald Trump is still president, and therefore the end of the world is nigh. The only new twist in this man-made disaster is that the people who surround him and enable him as he storms and fumes and tweets his way around the White House were willing to spill their guts for a new <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/business/media/michael-wolff-trump.html?hp&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=first-column-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news">blockbuster book</a>. They don't seem to realize how venal they themselves look by putting their careers and their fortunes above the good of the country as they gleefully call Boss Trump an idiot and a moron behind his back. The punditocracy is giving new life to the 25th amendment as a backup to the flailing RussiaGate investigation.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">These are the bombshell blockbusters dominating the official discourse this week. These are the cyclones in the news cycle.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">But conveniently lost in the swirling vortex are some malevolent plans to force the poorest of the poor to die more quickly than usual. People getting their healthcare through Medicaid will now be forced to work in some states, even though many of them already <i>do</i> work: whether be it toiling away at Walmart and McDonalds, or staying at home to care for children or sick or elderly family members.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">What Bill Clinton accomplished by kicking millions of people off cash welfare in the 90s, the Trump administration hopes to finish off by ensuring that the vulnerable fall through the remaining tatters of the safety net.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">As a matter of fact, the supposedly demented Trump and his minions are using Clintonian welfare reform (Temporary Aid to Needy Families, or TANF) as their template for the destruction of Medicaid. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seema_Verma">Seema Verma</a>, the arch-conservative ideologue and Hewlett-Packard exec named by Trump to lead the Medicare and Medicaid Services division of HHS, is spewing the old canard that&nbsp; "able-bodied" adults who get government-funded health care coverage are the victims of a form of bigotry. Unless they are forced to work until they drop, her twisted logic is, they will feel just like slaves, but without the sustaining self-sufficiency. "The days of low expectations are over," she vowed.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">But, as <a href="https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/medicaid-enrollees-and-work-requirements-lessons-from-the-tanf-experience/">a study</a> by the Kaiser Family Foundation on the efficacy of TANF for incentivizing welfare recipients to go to work has proven, people don't work because they're forced to, they work because they want to and they have to in order to live. People are not, as a rule, inherently lazy. People are unemployed for the simple reasons that they can't find work, or because they become too sick to work, or they got laid off, or because they otherwise face insurmountable barriers to employment. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Forcing Medicaid recipients to work will not only <i>not</i> lift them out of poverty, it potentially will have the result of impoverishing them still further, when employee labor costs such as transportation and child and elder care are factored into the Trump administration's proposed draconian requirements. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Furthermore, as the Kaiser study shows, the state administrative offices involved in implementing the TANF work requirement over the past two decades have ended up costing the government more than it ostensibly saves through its mandatory work requirements. It costs money to hire more bureaucrats to keep track of the people it is supposedly trying to "free" from willful idleness. It's also been demonstrated that the children of parents who are forced to work at low-paying jobs in exchange for minimal benefits have more behavioral problems, thus adding to the long-term costs to society of slashing safety net programs. Having Medicaid coverage when working at jobs which provide no health insurance at all actually saves both the government and private business money, because reliable heath care helps people to keep working, especially when their jobs involve repetitive stress and heavy lifting.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The Kaiser report authors add that when the Trump administration shames the "able-bodied adults" it would like to exclude from Medicaid, it doesn't even bother to define that term. It could very well include the mentally ill, the illiterate, the drug-addicted. Nobody knows, probably least of all the incurious and semi-literate Donald J. Trump.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The one silver lining of Seema Verma's hideous agenda is that so far, anyway,&nbsp; "only" eight states have expressed an interest in seeking a federal waiver for the Medicaid work requirement. Among them is economically hard-hit Kentucky, whose state-run KyNect marketplace and&nbsp; Medicaid expansion were lauded as the preeminent success story of the Affordable Care Act. The number of insured people there increased by 105% over four years, the largest increase of any state. Put another way, only six percent of Kentuckians remained uninsured last year.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The other seven states opting in to the work requirement are Arkansas, Arizona, Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire, Utah and Wisconsin, all of them led by conservative officials.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Matt Bevin, the Tea Party governor of Kentucky elected in 2015, at first wanted to completely overturn Obamacare's Medicaid expansion. But such was the uproar that he "softened" his stance somewhat, and is applying for a federal waiver not only for ushering in the work requirement, but for an actual reduction in services, beginning this year.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Among the proposed new requirements for getting a prescription filled, or getting a tooth filled, is passing the high school equivalency exam and enrolling in job training classes, as well as finding the financial means to attend courses dealing with smoking cessation and other health problems. People who've qualified for Medicaid because they meet poverty guidelines will also be monitored under what is dubbed a "My Rewards" account. Health expenditures exceeding $1,000 annually will count as a demerit on one's permanent record, although any actual rewards accruing to the compliant care-avoiding patient remain shrouded in mystery. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">As health reform advocate<a href="https://www.healthinsurance.org/kentucky-medicaid/"> Louise Norris points out</a>, with Bevin's plan almost guaranteed to get quick approval from the unhinged Trump administration, half a million Kentuckians will get kicked off the Medicaid rolls within five years. This will happen in a state which already <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/us/overdose-cases-kentucky.html">has one of the highest</a> death rates in the country from opioid overdoses: nearly 30 people out of every 100,000 last year.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Naturally, Medicaid has also become the convenient scapegoat for too many "able-bodied" adults scoring too many opioid prescriptions from unscrupulous pill mills. Carefully missing from these conversations is why people are getting hooked in the first place. Many times it's because they're out of a job, were evicted from their home, and are so bummed out that they will do just about anything to ease both their psychic and their physical pain.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span>&nbsp; <span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">This front in the class war of rich versus poor is the bomb cyclone which will tear families and workers apart for decades, if not for multiple generations. But to hear the mass media tell it, the real emergency and the real crime is still that Donald Jr. talked to "the Russians", and that fascist provocateur Steve Bannon is calling it treasonous.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Donald Trump is far from the only nut in this party mix. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/bomb-cyclone-for-healthcare.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-251512735903889130Wed, 03 Jan 2018 16:05:00 +00002018-01-04T11:15:58.533-05:00class wardeficit hawksross douthatsnakesMolting Season For Deficit Hawks<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Resident <i>New York Times</i> altar boy Ross Douthat <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/opinion/confessions-of-a-columnist.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion-columnists&amp;action=click&amp;contentCollection=columnists&amp;region=stream&amp;module=stream_unit&amp;version=latest&amp;contentPlacement=1&amp;pgtype=sectionfront&amp;_r=0">slunk into the confessional</a> last weekend and pleasured himself with what he called some righteous journalistic flagellation. Now that Republicans are firmly entrenched in power, and now that the billionaires and corporations have been gifted with the permanent tax cuts costing the public at least a trillion dollars per decade, Douthat has nobly decided to apologize for being so wrong about his life-long crusade against Big Bad Government. It turns it's been a pretty damned Good Big Government&nbsp; all along, working as it has for the benefit of the very rich at the expense of everyone else. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">So in the interests of the sated (for now) alpha-raptors of the oligarchy and the mid-term appetites of the Reptilpublican Party, Douthat is dutifully retreating to the molting room for recovering deficit hawks. He's clinging to his John Maynard Keynes breviary as he recites the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confiteor"><i>Confiteor</i></a> and pretends to shed some of that self-righteous plumage of his. </span><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wARgcUc6VFM/Wkzs_lyOD2I/AAAAAAAAGlQ/jtqvDDF_bxkjDHIwO_FtStf4qRB1uXfQACLcBGAs/s1600/molting%2Bhawk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="258" data-original-width="244" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wARgcUc6VFM/Wkzs_lyOD2I/AAAAAAAAGlQ/jtqvDDF_bxkjDHIwO_FtStf4qRB1uXfQACLcBGAs/s400/molting%2Bhawk.jpg" width="378" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Through My Squawk, Through My Squawk, Through My Most Grievous Squawk</td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"></span></div><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Douthat used to pretend to be afraid of inflation. But now that the tax overhaul will inflate the wallets of the Forbes 400 to bursting, he no longer has the appetite for bullshit which has already served its purpose:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Instead, in hindsight the most important economic argument of the early Obama years was between <a href="https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/monetarism-falls-short-somewhat-wonkish/">two schools of thought</a> that agreed we should put more money into the economy and only <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/415394/krugmans-fatal-conceit-ramesh-ponnuru">disagreed about how to do it</a> — the Keynesians who wanted massive government spending and the market monetarists who favored looser monetary policy. Today, both sides of that debate look far better than the strict fiscal and monetary hawks, and the endless arguments about Bowles-Simpson look like an interesting exercise that did not deserve so much swarming attention from politicians and the press.</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">So far, so good. But then again, </span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;<i>There are always real limits on what government spending or tax cuts can accomplish and how far they can go. A society only has so much productive capacity, dumb tax cuts can be hoarded and dumb spending used to enrich special interests or subsidize <b>social pathology</b>, and too much spending can eventually induce inflation.</i></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Despite his self-flagellation with a few loose strands of al dente pasta, Douthat still cannot resist labeling the lower classes as a "social pathology," can he? He simply cannot flagellate to the extent of redirecting his knout at the real pathologies: the Pentagon and Wall Street, aka the Military-Industrial Complex.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">My published response to his column:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">This sounds suspiciously like a mea culpa of convenience. Now that the obscenely rich have been awarded their reverse Robin Hood of a tax cut, it's finally safe for the deficit hawks to admit that the austerity they've been shoving down our throats for the past decade and longer was nothing but a scam to enrich the oligarchs like they've never been enriched before.<br /><br />Since this will be an election year, of course it behooves the GOP to pretend to embrace Keynes and modern monetary theory while the embracing's good... for them and their paymasters, that is. As long as they can fool enough of the people in their gerrymandered districts about their sudden devotion to Medicare and Social Security, they can bide their time until November, when the safety net slashings can re-commence with gleeful abandon.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp;Ross gives the whole cynical game away when he implies that Social Security recipients "misspend" their paltry monthly checks, and furthermore, that this worker-funded insurance program be means-tested. Do you see too many old people selfishly eating three meals a day, Ross? Irresponsibly blowing their noses on three-ply tissue instead of two-ply? Wastefully setting their thermostats at 68 degrees instead of a more seemly 55? I really am curious about how you expect people just barely scraping by as it is to save cash.<br /><br />If deficits really don't matter (and they don't) then I challenge Ross to support expanded Social Security and Medicare for All.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Now, just because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has sorely disappointed diehard deficit hawk Paul Ryan by vowing that Medicare and Social Security cuts will be off the table during this election year doesn't mean that vulnerable people still can't be punished in other creatively destructive ways.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">That the leaders of both corporate political parties are getting together with the White House this week to wheel and deal and horse-trade and sausage-grind on the budget should be cause for great concern. Safety net cuts always work better when they're done in an opaque, bipartisan, accountability-free fashion. For example, the GOP might give an inch on DACA protections for young immigrants coupled with inhumane border crackdowns, while the Democrats might give a mile on more food stamp cuts and a major "reform" of the federal disability benefit system for the extremely poor. It always helps the oligarchic cause whenever they're forced to work in secret under an artificial deadline - in this case, the January 19th end to their bipartisan "continuing resolution" to keep the government open.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">So while the deficit hawks might be in their merely temporary rest period, the molting of the Snakes in Suits will proceed at breakneck speed every day of the year. It has to. They are so engorged on their prey they have to keep shedding to grow all that shiny, scaly new skin and continue slithering around, searching for new victims to torture and kill. As usual, vast expenditures for perpetual war and the mass surveillance of citizens will not be subject to much, if any, debate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">In the serpentarium known as Congress, the Democrats are the baby boa constrictors, who lie around lethargically when they're not lovingly squeezing their victims - who, legend has it, "have nowhere else to go" - while they sleep. The Republicans are the friskier reptiles, puff adders and rattlesnakes who make a lot of show and noise as they sink their fangs into the body politic before they feed the bulk of the carcass to the King of All the Reptiles: the Corporocracy.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GE_Cbge5aVA/Wkz5B8MFAiI/AAAAAAAAGlg/CkPenvpp03wFnL8abCpNtJ7YSSe8PV8vQCLcBGAs/s1600/sated%2Bsnake.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="299" height="224" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GE_Cbge5aVA/Wkz5B8MFAiI/AAAAAAAAGlg/CkPenvpp03wFnL8abCpNtJ7YSSe8PV8vQCLcBGAs/s400/sated%2Bsnake.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Lament at the Billionaire Zoo: "I Can't Believe I Ate the Whole Thing"</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/molting-season-for-deficit-hawks.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-6007370360219367424Mon, 01 Jan 2018 21:08:00 +00002018-01-02T11:25:46.453-05:00neoliberalismobamaphilanthrocapilismpovertyNeoliberal New Year: Goody Bags For the Homeless<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The best part of the New Year for me so far is that the flood of fundraising appeals from political organizations and parties and charities has suddenly dried right up, virtually overnight. Especially annoying were those hysterical come-ons promising that my monetary gift would be <i>triple-matched </i>by some mystery mogul. If I didn't give, the implication was, this pathocratic jerk would just keep hoarding his excess cash out of pure, miserable spite.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Even more annoying than the year-end money grubs were the false pretenses under which the money was being grubbed. And out of the hundreds of appeals I've received over the past few weeks, none was more disgusting than the mawkish missive I received from former president Barack Obama.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">In this cruel winter of brutal cold, with homelessness and opioid addiction reaching record levels, Obama took some time out from his umpteenth tropical vacation to thaw out the hearts of <a href="https://www.obama.org/contributors/">his donors </a>with his own award-winning brand of contagious inspiration.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">If you ever listened to his insipid weekly addresses to the nation during his&nbsp; eight-year tenure, you should know the formula by now.&nbsp; It always starts out with the obligatory gushy gaslighting - since life is so good and optimistic for<i> him,</i> then it naturally follows that it has to be good for you, too. If you're not solidly in the middle class, then at least you can <i>aspire</i> to membership by dint of hard work and magical thinking. Pay no attention to the harsh realities surrounding you, lest you become jaded. The dismal results of austerity for the masses and riches for the rich are mere "challenges" to be confronted with the same old piecemeal solutions contained in shiny new gift-wrap.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">There will apparently never be an end to his victim-shaming, financialized way of seeing things, aptly described by <a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/adolph-reed-identity-politics-exposing-class-division-in-democrats.html">Adolph Reed, Jr.</a> as a "vacuous-to-repressive" worldview. Obama writes in his latest email to potential donors:</span></span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>I know optimism isn't always fashionable. Certainly not when we're fed a steady stream of cynicism on television and an on social media. We face some extraordinary <b>challenges</b>, but consider the long view. If you think about it, by almost every measure, America and the world are better off than they were fifty, twenty, even ten years ago.</i></span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">(And they still wonder why Hillary "America Is Good Because America is Great" Clinton lost to the cruel but occasionally brutally honest Donald Trump?&nbsp; Of course, in politician-speak, "America" is code for the Plutonomy, which is indeed better off than ever before, at the expense of the rest of us.)</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">But because Obama was the first cosmetically Black person to be elected president, it just naturally follows that <i>all </i>Black people are better off as a result, despite the fact that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/how-barack-obama-failed-black-americans/511358/">they became much worse off</a> during his tenure. Still, he blithely reassures his wealthy potential donors that because <i>they</i> elevated the first technically Black person to the presidency, there's no need to worry their coddled little heads about the rest of the Black population. He avoids the obvious truth: that the Owner Class has always allowed a few women and people of color to advance as a way of keeping white supremacy and wealth inequality alive and well and immune from liberal criticism: </span></span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>I was born at a time when women and people of color were systematically, routinely excluded from huge portions of American (read: plutocracy) life.. Today women and minorities are rising up in the ranks of business, politics and everywhere else. That's just one of the significant shifts we've seen And when you measure it against the scope of human history - it happened in an instant!</i></span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Since Gilens and Page established that the wealthy donor class, as a group, are adamantly opposed to government spending on social programs, health care, and public education, Obama willingly feeds this gilded age pathology by denying reality every bit as viciously as his faux-nemesis, Donald J. Trump. In a time of rising death rates in this country, deaths due to outright despair and rank poverty, Obama actually schmoozes:</span></span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>Around the world, we live at a time when fewer people are dying young and more people are not only living longer, but better. </i></span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Remember that Obama is talking to the wealthy donor class. I doubt that many of the world's poor people got to read his Happy New Year telegram. They not only don't have the Internet, they often don't even have electricity (like half of Puerto Rico), or are otherwise occupied fleeing violence or scavenging for food. But maybe they will rise up eventually, though not in the mawkish way that Obama pretends to envision.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The fact is that more people are living short, nasty, brutish lives. Obama seems to be <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/exposing-great-poverty-reductio-201481211590729809.html">cherry-picking </a>his happy statistics in order to make his donors feel better about their own unfair share of the pie. To make a terrible situation look good, corporation-beholden entities like the World Bank measure income inequality when they should be measuring wealth inequality. Also, the very definition of poverty has been diluted down to make things seem rosier than they really are. Even though poverty has been steadily increasing over the last several decades, the actual number of poor people is artificially decreasing, thanks to capitalistic measurement tools based upon bullshit rather than upon math. The United Nations' Millennium Campaign, for example, currently defines extreme poverty as living on a dollar a day. In actuality, though, in such rich countries as the US, people who scrape by on $2 cash a day are correctly defined as being extremely poor. As a matter of fact, the US government itself calculated more than a decade ago that people needed at least $4.50 a day to meet even basic minimum nutrition requirements.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics calls the baseline poverty definition used by Obama and his neoliberal cohort absurdly unrealistic. If Obama used honest parameters, though, he'd have have to admit that at least 80 percent of the world's population now lives in abject poverty. And that might make the rich greedsters feel very poorly about themselves. So poorly, in fact, that they might not give their unearned and untaxed wealth to the tax-exempt Obama Foundation for Oligarchic Feel-Goodery.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9eIIPo5uAtU/WkqlXzfuJ8I/AAAAAAAAGlA/TYOJgtn3mTEoHKt21D_GSiEHANj39uDewCLcBGAs/s1600/obama%2Blibrary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="223" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9eIIPo5uAtU/WkqlXzfuJ8I/AAAAAAAAGlA/TYOJgtn3mTEoHKt21D_GSiEHANj39uDewCLcBGAs/s400/obama%2Blibrary.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Family-Friendly Brutalism</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">So to prove that this is the best of all possible worlds, Obama offers three anecdotes about the sunny side of Dystopia. Two of his stories involve the oppressed helping the oppressed in order to achieve the desired inspiring level of Bootstrapping Nirvana. And, because tax-dodging philanthrocapitalism is the solution of last resort as social programs get cut and slashed by the oligarch-run government, Obama also gushes over a multimillionaire sports star who is donating his paychecks to fund scholarships for a whole new generation of Baracks and Michelles.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Concerned about the epidemic of homelessness? Don't be. Who needs a roof over one's head when one can be blessed with goody bags? Obama writes:</span></span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><i>At five years old, Jahkil Jackson had witnessed the struggles of Chicago's homeless when his aunt took him to Lower Wacker Drive to hand out food to those camped there. He found himself restless, wanting to do more. With a spark of inspiration and the help of his family, Jahkil created Blessing Bags - kits full of socks, toiletries and snacks that he could offer to those in need.</i></span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">"Let them eat goody bags" is so much more heartwarming than Trump's heartless "let them eat paper towels" response to the victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, is it not?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Now, to be fair to Obama, he is just echoing the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless's own piecemeal solutions to the lack of permanent affordable housing for poor people. Perhaps (I think cynically to myself) with the windfall profits from their new permanent tax breaks, such <a href="http://www.chicagohomeless.org/funding/corporate-sponsors/">corporate sponsors </a>as JP Morgan Chase can build some actual houses for the homeless, rather than continuing to corner the market on the same homes they foreclosed (often illegally) during Obama's tenure. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">If you happen to be among the millions of people devastated by last year's record storms and fires, Obama doesn't want you to complain about how slow and meager the response from Trump's government has been.&nbsp; Instead, we must follow the example of the Houston wedding planner who, rather than waste a whole banquet, helped the bride to distribute all that excess food around the neighborhood. Why hector your congress critters for actual monetary aid and government help when you can augment your wedding planning business by starting your own Facebook page to organize debris-clearing parties, and then dub it "Recovery Houston?" It certainly gets FEMA off the hook.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Are you a rich athlete who's making out like a bandit from Trump's tax cuts?&nbsp; Then aspire to be like Philadelphia linebacker Chris Long, and donate some of your paychecks to fund a few scholarships, and thereby tamp down both racist hate and all that unicorny talk of free college from the likes of Bernie Sanders.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Barack Obama, that glib and glittering neoliberal tool of Wall Street, is retooling himself as an international goodwill ambassador of continuing austerity for the many and prosperity for the few. Rather than demand more generous government disaster aid, construction of public housing, and an end to lifetimes full of crushing student debt, he's simply continuing to do what what he did as president. He is calling for tiny symbolic gestures and using his own celebrity persona as a beacon of hope and inspiration. He is continuing his career as a consummate bullshitter.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Taking this inspirational bullshitting journey with Barack Obama will cost a lot of money. Therefore, rather than direct private or public cash aid to the poor and vulnerable, Barack Obama wants the money to be sent directly to him, to fund his continued lecturing to the poor and minorities, but mainly for the construction a $500 million shrine to himself in Chicago, complete with golf course. "Transaction fees" to cover your digital donations will be extra. Besides boring old cash and checks, wire transfers will also be cheerfully accepted - not least because, just like Obama's fantastical list of global recovery improvements, they "happen in an instant." Especially during this latest stock market bubble, there's no need to even redeem any your marketable securities. For your full tax-deductible convenience, just have your broker or your private wealth manager fill out the paperwork so that both you and Obama can get the most bang for your charity buck.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">*** </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">My own New Year's resolution, as I enter my eighth year of blogging, is to do my best to keep exposing neoliberalism as the deadly germ warfare of rich versus poor that it truly is.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">So... here's to a realistically hopeful and happy 2018 to everybody except the billionaires, the Trumps, the Clintons, the Bushes, the Obamas, the corporate media, the military-industrial complex, and most members of Congress.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/01/neoliberal-new-year-goody-bags-for.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-6156530991190476532Wed, 27 Dec 2017 17:56:00 +00002017-12-29T12:28:59.404-05:00barack obamadonald trumpgallup pollhillary clintonHillary Is the Least Most Admired Woman In the USA<span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">&nbsp; </span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vwMH8p5RsgE/WkPdwvDAtKI/AAAAAAAAGkw/yli3nTnjgFY-0qF8p1Q_zMwINfn65XFxgCLcBGAs/s1600/hillary%2Bclinton.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="162" data-original-width="311" height="208" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vwMH8p5RsgE/WkPdwvDAtKI/AAAAAAAAGkw/yli3nTnjgFY-0qF8p1Q_zMwINfn65XFxgCLcBGAs/s400/hillary%2Bclinton.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Although<a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/27/most-admired-man-woman-gallup-319367?lo=ap_a1"> Hillary Clinton has again won</a> the over-hyped Gallup title as the "most admired woman" in the United States, her slim margin of victory over Michelle Obama essentially makes her the least popular winner in the entire history of this horribly annoying poll.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">In another wipe-out,&nbsp; Donald Trump narrowly lost to Barack Obama. If nothing else, this result is sure to engender a torrent of new "it was rigged!" tweets from the president, in what is traditionally a very slow news week. If it's any consolation, Obama still has a lot of catching up to do to beat Dwight Eisenhower's own record as most admired man in America ever in the history of Gallup polling.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">If it is any further consolation to Trump, although "Crooked Hillary" has retained her popularity title for the 16th consecutive year out of 22 total lifetime wins, finding even a couple hundred people to vote for her out of the thousand-odd who were polled was a fraught enterprise. "She managed to win this year because she remains arguably more prominent than other contenders," Gallup contended. "However, retaining that stature may be more challenging in coming years with her political career likely over."</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">Ouch. Well, it could always have been worse. Gallup could have gone the Vanity Fair<i> </i>route and advised Hillary to take up a new hobby, such as knitting. Although the usual purveyors of manufactured liberal outrage are <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/vanity-fair-hillary-clinton-new-years-resolution_us_5a430a1fe4b06d1621b5d100?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009">screaming "sexism"</a> at this harmless snark, I think the people who should be really offended by this hysteria are the knitters of America. Admired males and females alike can be, and historically have been,<a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carolyn-bucior/men-who-knit_b_3860427.html"> accomplished knitters</a>. As a crocheter myself, I was even a little jealous that Vanity Fair hadn't recommended <i>my</i> needlework skill-set to this minimally admired person.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">If it's any further, further consolation to Trump, Gallup also predicts that as a sitting president, he's bound to beat Obama sooner or later - provided, of course, that he is still the most unpopular President this same time next year. The pollsters predict that Barry's star will soon fade as well, despite <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/world/europe/obama-prince-harry-interview.html">that over-hyped interview</a> with Prince Harry Saxe-Coburg (whose great-uncle the Duke of Windsor, by the way, became an <a href="http://knitty.com/ISSUEsummer05/FEATtopten.html">enthusiastic knitter after his abdication</a>) was "breaking the Internet" this week. No matter, though. If Obama can brag that he, out of hundreds of millions of other Americans, felt delightfully "serene" as he listened to Trump's bizarre inauguration speech last January, he probably doesn't get too needled when it comes to people admiring him or not.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">The other runners-up in this year's popularity contest were a mixed bag, ranging from Pope Francis to Mike Pence to Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren to Benjamin Netanyahoo to Beyonce.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">For those of you who care enough to be actually knitting your brows over the poll results, please take heart. Because fully one-quarter of those contacted by Gallup could not name one single person whom they most admire. Another nine percent chose a friend or a family member over any of the usual Big Media Names.&nbsp;</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;verdana&quot; , sans-serif;">This exhibit of independent thinking from a tiny but "statistically significant" sample of the American populace is what actually gives me a smidgen of hope for the New Year.</span>http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2017/12/hillary-is-least-most-admired-woman-in.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Karen Garcia)5